tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48947640354394196562019-05-24T10:26:44.633-07:00Humble WonderfulNever stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger163125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-58366196226875886802018-07-02T20:30:00.003-07:002018-07-02T20:58:58.733-07:00In Solidarity with Myself: A Reflection on Passing as a Catholic Teacher.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RkxwnV349mM/WzrtvNrYfZI/AAAAAAAABvk/12f8aGBj0RsPSHi3Js55HTo-741Lv2Z_gCLcBGAs/s1600/JobInterview1.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RkxwnV349mM/WzrtvNrYfZI/AAAAAAAABvk/12f8aGBj0RsPSHi3Js55HTo-741Lv2Z_gCLcBGAs/s400/JobInterview1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />I am a teacher. I currently travel an hour down country roads to work as a casual relief teacher at a public school in a small town. I would like to work closer to home so as to be more present for my family. Many people ask me if I have looked for work at the local Catholic high schools. I did once a long time ago but I haven’t since my last period of employment.<br /><br />I would, for the most part, enjoy working at a Catholic school. I often mention how Catholic schools are ahead of public schools in terms of incorporating Australian Aboriginal perspectives in their curriculum. I believe education is a part of our fulfillment of our duty to the needs of others, not just a ticket to our own increased personal income and broadly speaking that is the Catholic ethos too. Lastly I like teaching kids in any environment. I could focus on them and not on all the policies of the church running the show.<br /><br />But if I went for a job at a Catholic school I would have to accept a certain level of discrimination in my hiring and my retention of the job, discrimination that would be illegal in the public school system. This means that effectively in regards to employment at a Catholic school I will get preferential treatment for my heterosexual marriage compared to anyone who is gay or in a defacto relationship. Due to my Catholic upbringing I could also pretend to be Catholic. I look like a married Catholic man with kids – just the sort of person that would appropriately reflect the values and tone of the school.<br /><br />This picture isn’t telling you my truth. I am married, now. We had our two children first, “in sin” and married when it felt right for both of us. So you know that I had sex outside of marriage. Some of that sex was also with other blokes. I’ve also comfortably been an ex- Catholic for a long time. I can still recall most of the prayers but I parted company with the church when it struck me that I wouldn’t even join a stamp collecting club if it only allowed men in its government let alone a world religion. About the only time I rediscover my Catholic identity is if someone generalizes unfairly about Catholics and I feel a need to rebut them. “We don’t actually eat babies”, I say, arms momentarily linked with my Catholic kin.<br /><br />To take and hold a job at a Catholic school would necessarily involve “passing” as someone I am not. I want to discuss this concept of “passing” in depth. For some of you it’s a familiar concept and this essay probably isn’t for you. For others it may name clearly something that pervades your life that you’ve lacked a word for. For others still you may have only a limited experience of passing and little idea that it can be harmful. I first heard the word passing when it was used to describe when transgender people successfully convince society that they are a cisgender member of the gender they are transitioning to. In my early twenties I myself could cross dress to pass, meaning I could convince people that I was a biological woman by simply changing my appearance. Passing is also used when older people try to look younger. Passing could be used in the context of prosthetics to describe a limb that looks like one of flesh and blood. People with mental illnesses often find sophisticated ways of passing as well in order to avoid medical interventions or social stigma.<br /><br />Passing generally operates inside social hierarchies as a way to gain social benefits. An older woman may try to pass as younger to avoid age discrimination in a job interview. A young person may mask their disability to avoid social stigma and pity. Gay men might pass as straight to avoid homophobia. Failing to pass means failing to obtain the rights and privileges of passing. At the pointy end this means safety from violence – to pass as cisgender is decidedly safer in our world than to be noticeably transgender. Passing is often not that hard because passing is fitting in with the expectations of a society that doesn’t want to notice your complexity, or difficulty or sadness or uniqueness or “wrongness” in their eyes. Passing is the culturally smoother outcome for everyone.<br /><br />We all pass, or try to. We do it strategically and yet as easily as paying someone a basic courtesy. We smile when we are down. Doing so allows us to breeze through an interaction at the checkout counter. We don’t have to deal with other people’s concern for our welfare and they don’t have to deal with their concern either. It’s handy. We gain the benefits of everyone thinking we’re ok. Passing doesn’t necessarily make us a victim of oppression or bound by the shackles of society. It can just be a way to navigate social environments simply and to choose when to be open and with whom.<br /><br />We are also however obliged to pass and that is much more toxic to tolerate. Women in particular can be told to smile as they walk along by complete strangers. Is the male issuer of this decree asking the woman to pass as the pretty young thing he would like to see rather than her actual self? I doubt its been reflected on that deeply, but the effect is the same. Thank goodness for all the women who don’t try to “fight ageing”, fake a smile and laugh off harassment or for that matter eliminate body and facial hair. By refusing to pass as someone else’s ideal they open up space for every other woman not to.<br /><br />I want to stress that when we make efforts to pass, even in capitulation to others threats or demands, it is not fair to say that we are closing off space for others. The people who oblige passing do that with their commands and their criticisms. The people who threaten violence or discrimination to those who don’t pass or try to pass do that. People attempting to pass are simply living their lives as strategically as they can, perhaps even with safety in mind. Still, if we are successful the consequences of not passing will pass over us and hit others who are less successful. This is why in oppressed communities people who can pass as not belonging to that community are not always trusted as allies. They possess a privilege that isn’t healthy to use and might only work partially but is still real.<br /><br />I could easily pass as someone who holds Catholic values about the expression of sexuality and the meaning of marriage (although curious minds might wonder how we stopped at two kids). I could mention my family to my students without concern. In fact, for me, it takes extraordinary effort to not pass. I have to pretty much “come out” as not who I look like if I want people to know. But I think its important to do this. Boringly, I have probably “come out” as having a queer past on this blog more times than I remember. That is me trying not to pass as what I look like. That is me trying to hold open the spaces for others and myself to be different. It’s healthy for me to do this but I’ll concede it becomes a tad repetitive.<br /><br />There’s also a complex space I inhabit where my queer past isn’t really my true self either. I would feel wrong if I placed myself on a panel as a queer speaker. I don’t feel I can claim to speak from that position. I am married, in a marriage that doesn’t have to argue with anyone for recognition. Holding hands with my partner doesn’t put me at extra risk of violence. This is not because I am passing as straight but because my current expression of my sexuality is straight. In all this talk of passing in order to work at a Catholic school I don’t want to understate my heterosexual priveleges (or desire) or deny the oppressions of others. Sometimes it can be hard to divide what priveleges we obtain by virtue of who we are, and what privileges we obtain by passing as something we are not. Men after all gain privileges for being men but often only if they can pass as what society values men as (masculine, brave, tough) which is never really their whole truth.<br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Be0XWyxVLSU/WzrsDzRn9hI/AAAAAAAABvY/ZTjYKa3K7kcblakm1nHkmainbzwiEMo9ACLcBGAs/s1600/fuckgenderroles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="493" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Be0XWyxVLSU/WzrsDzRn9hI/AAAAAAAABvY/ZTjYKa3K7kcblakm1nHkmainbzwiEMo9ACLcBGAs/s320/fuckgenderroles.jpg" width="246" /></a><br />There are many critical responses to “passing”. For example, there are transgender theorists who argue “passing” only reinforces gender based oppression. To pass as a woman one needs to embrace the icky politics of narrow definitions of visually being a woman. When I passed as a woman the easiest way to do this was to remove any facial, leg and underarm hair. These cues, plus socks in a bra, was enough for a young man with longish hair in dim light to pass as female. What does this say however about women’s body hair? Why couldn’t I have been read as a woman with unshaved underarms? To do so would have risked not passing. I made a choice to pass first. And then later I didn’t by embracing they style of “Gender-fuck”.<br /><br />Within transgender politics one expression of gender identity has deliberately tried to challenge the value of passing. “Gender-fuck” is the colloquial term for transgressing gendered appearance rules in order to show them up as arbitrary and even to highlight their absurdity. The goal of gender-fuck is to create confusion in the reading of the person as male or female rather than to be successfully read as either one. There have always been spaces in culture for people playing this role – The bearded lady in the circus or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. If punk is a movement fueled by positive rebellion&nbsp; Gender-fuck is when Punk meets drag. I remember my days at uni in an a-frame frock with ripped up sleeves and facial hair as more freeing than dressing in any other way. I’ve yet to find a place of employment where this exact outfit would feel appropriate though. What I really enjoyed was abandoning the goal of passing as anything.<br /><br />I want to be clear that I’m not saying every dress choice we make is either an attempt to pass or a rebellion against passing. A lot of our self representation choices have no relationship to passing as anything. Nowadays I wear a tie to work almost every day. This is my way of reminding myself that the students I work with in an underprivileged state school deserve as much professionalism as those at the local hoity-toity private school which would require a tie of me. I don’t think this choice can be understood through the lens of passing. I’m not trying to pass as a guy with my tie. I have a moustache that genders me perfectly well on its own and my reason for keeping that has its own story. I hope I haven’t held up passing as the way to understand all choices about appearance.<br /><br />When we do attempt to pass the effect can be toxic. This is because when we aspire to present an image for others we can internalize the message that our truth is something to be ashamed of. I don’t want to generalize too much here. I think I personally have a very low tolerance for passing. I am inclined to interrogate myself as to why I might be keeping anything private from my friends and I don’t enjoy the suspicion that I am doing so in order to avoid their judgment. Other people I know seem to have a higher tolerance for passing. They like their privacy. They don’t mind wearing a mask to maintain it. I found being a waiter the hardest job because even when you are having a lousy day you are supposed to convince customers you are totally loving your job. As a teacher or as a drug and alcohol worker or as a school cleaner I have never felt the same pressure to pass as happy. This doesn’t make me better than people who can cope being a waiter. Frankly I think they have wisdom I lack.<br /><br />My intolerance of passing is a key reason why I don’t want to work at a Catholic school. In the public system I don’t burden my current co-workers or employer with my life story but I don’t have any fear of them finding out. I don’t feel like mentioning my wife in the staff room is part of a ploy to fit in. I believe in public secular education for a lot of reasons but I don’t think the Catholic education system is bad by comparison. At a state school I don’t need to pass to work there though. At a Catholic school I would feel like I need to out myself constantly or be taken for someone I’m not.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-68588123418050345862018-05-03T21:07:00.001-07:002018-05-03T21:07:55.680-07:00Missing Church<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UMLAyl7NgnY/WuvccYp6dcI/AAAAAAAABuQ/Ybk2lV6h1E0IprL70pE3LDix_5bBi7mUACLcBGAs/s1600/st.matts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UMLAyl7NgnY/WuvccYp6dcI/AAAAAAAABuQ/Ybk2lV6h1E0IprL70pE3LDix_5bBi7mUACLcBGAs/s320/st.matts.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Lately I have had a falling out with Christianity. Not a falling out with Christians, family or friends, but a grumpy disappointment with the theology of it. This is a not new cycle for me and not especially unique to Christianity. I’ve invested in and then fallen out with Buddhism and the Tarot in the past. It seems like I put a lot of hope into something being the something that makes sense of everything and then, crash, it fails to support the weight I’ve given it. I then resent the philosophy for fooling me about its flaws when I know, to be fair, I fooled myself.<br /><br />Non-Christian friends have asked me in the past why I put so much effort into understanding Christianity. Part of it is that I am not an ideologue about religion – despite how I may sound at times. When my partners parents are over I like to remember to offer that we say grace before dinner. And in return they have never batted an eyelid when we don’t. I don’t get angry at people who express thanks to God for saving them from a hurricane the way some non-believers do because I don’t think that person is really saying God blessed them and cursed others. I think they’re just grateful –as I would be if a flying car missed my head and my partners head and my kids heads. I also think a lot of religious concepts – even hell – are useful philosophically – even if I don’t think they are physically real. I don’t, as I have said many times, think whether a person believes in God or not matters that much. I don’t think our opinions on God’s existence need to divide us or can meaningfully unite us either.<br /><br />On top of this I believe in community. I believe our society is stupidly atomized into nuclear families which are themselves disintegrating in favour of the individual. There are positives to individualism, don’t get me wrong. I think certain calls for a return to the glory days of arranged marriages as a fix to individualism are bound up in those speakers blind privilege. Long live individualism in romance. Go for it Jack and Rose (Titanic movie reference). But economic individualism is something else. When you can find families where one sibling is wealthy while another is in crushing debt, what hope do we have of ever reducing the chasm between rich and poor in wider society? Wealth inequality is the worst it has ever been in human history and getting worse. I believe it is, on a structural level, threatening our planet and all life on it. We need to all get in the same boat economically or more and more people will keep drowning.<br /><br />So when I’m not an ideologue about religion and I believe in community why wouldn’t I go to church? Churches are one of the few remaining non-capitalist spaces left – ignoring for a second the huckster variants with their miracles for sale. In a church you can’t buy anyone’s approval and you can’t not afford to attend. There is a general inclination towards collectivism. When a church holds a lunch its not usually bring your own or sausages for individual sale. The food is on the table for everyone and the costs are covered by donation. If the dishes need doing then everyone can pitch in and while this can lead to women pitching in more than men that’s a charge that can be leveled at any community and it can be challenged at church. In some churches at least, there is a strong desire to tackle decisions collectively, and powerful checks on ego and hierarchy. I don’t bother with churches with a clerical authority. My time in the Catholic tradition is done. But there are those that rotate worship leaders and value discussion over preaching at a congregation. It’s like a commune of like minded people.<br /><br />The dilemma is, that I am not so like-minded as the rest. <st1:place w:st="on">Lot</st1:place>’s of churches include a diversity of views. Some church goers were among those who recently voted yes for same sex marriage while others voted no. All Churches with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>male only clergy would include some members for women’s ordination. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Not every Christian has the same attitude to the bible. Not every Christian has the same idea of the afterlife or how prayer is supposed to work or what a Christian life should look like. But generally every Christian has a respectful attitude towards the Bible, as a place they want to return to for inspiration, if not instruction. Generally every Christian believes in an afterlife and with that an eternal nature to the soul. Generally every Christian considers Jesus uniquely special, not just part of a pantheon of good guys along with Robin Hood and Jim Henson. Generally every Christian wants to check their life in with a being or at least force they call God so that they can be living on the right track, either through prayer or biblical study or reflecting on God or some combination of these. I don’t. <br /><br />The one hesitation I feel when writing “I don’t” to the above generalities about Christians is that I would like to <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>check in with God. And by God I mean a loosely fluid concept representing “goodness”. Checking in with goodness to see if I am doing good in the world is certainly one reason why I have gone to church in the past. I am inclined to laziness and self-importance. I need to check in somehow. But checking in with goodness is fundamentally not the same as checking in with God. Or maybe it could be but while it has felt similar enough in the past to make attending church useful it now feels different enough to make sharing that checking in with Christians not helpful. I’m not so sure God, real or not, is so good.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />All of this might change. I might go back to church next week and if I did I know I would be welcomed without question. There would be a morning tea of shared food and if I brought something it would be accepted and if I forgot to bring anything it would not be thought of. A group of people I count as friends would be there, noticing if I was down or bringing their own need to the group. The Bible would be consulted to seek out God’s loving plan to restore a just world. Connected to this there might be a chance to reflect on how to be a part of that plan in relation to refugees, or the environment or the neglected and isolated people in our community. Songs would be sung, lamentations over injustice, or praises of a sacrificial God. Maybe a collection plate would be passed around but without obligation or even pressure. People would ask the group to pray for themselves or for others and the group would do so without haste. <br /><br />Sometimes I think some of my atheist friends think that church is where Christians go to hang out and loudly judge those who aren’t there, especially atheists. I think some services in some more fundy churches I have attended in the past resembled that but its truly not a common form. The church I have attended till recently (can I still say “my” church?) has never, ever done that. People value their time there, for themselves, as a place to challenge their own flaws, way too much. Likewise it isn’t because I think I am flawless that I haven’t been attending church. I don’t feel that church is currently the best way for me to check those flaws but if you, whatever your beliefs, think joining a church community might be for you, I would definitely recommend St. Matthews in Long Gully, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Bendigo</st1:city></st1:place>. You might see me there, but I currently wouldn’t expect to. Enjoy the morning tea.</div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-18341280493851510742018-02-04T20:18:00.003-08:002018-02-04T21:28:45.764-08:00Against whom have I sinned? Part 2.<div class="MsoNormal">In my<a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/against-whom-have-i-sinned.html"> last post </a>I presented the problem of how a particular Christian understanding of “sin” can be used to overlook victims. The specific sins I am considering here are those with human victims; murder, assault, unjust incarceration. I claim that it is necessary within Christianity to rationalize God as the sole or primary offended party when people commit such sin, in order to give God, through Jesus, the prerogative to forgive such sin completely. I concluded however with the recognition that many passionate Christians do acknowledge human victims indicating that they have an understanding of sin and of God’s offence that overcomes the problem I outlined.<br /><br />A recent news event and its discussion is worth mentioning here. Rachael Denhollander was a victim of Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse while a young girl. She was also the first to publicly accuse him. At Larry Nassar’s sentencing hearing Denhollander gave a powerful impact statement which “went viral” in Christian media circles. Rachael expressed in <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/january-web-only/rachael-denhollander-larry-nassar-forgiveness-gospel.html">a follow up interview</a> how she knows first hand the glibness that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness can express towards victims and even how it can be used as a weapon to minimize their abuse. Rachel Denhollander is clear that her own understanding of forgiveness “means that I trust in God’s justice and I release bitterness and anger and a desire for personal vengeance. It does not mean that I minimize or mitigate or excuse what he has done. It does not mean that I pursue justice on earth any less zealously.”<br /><br />When I read Denhollander's words and when I learn of her actions in bringing Nassar to justice as well as exposing other abuses and supporting other victims, I feel like its better for anyone to read her words over mine on this matter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v4aekQwKIKs/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v4aekQwKIKs?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><br />I’ll go on though, because I want to outline very clearly an alternative understanding of the mechanism of sin and forgivenenss that Christians can take up. Denhollander has reinforced for me how relevant this is to changing how churches respond to institutional abuse. Firstly it is not necessary to consider God’s forgiveness as sufficient for all matters. A person who kills another person may be forgiven by God for the pertinent offence to God (harming their creation or disobeying God’s laws), but this does not remove their obligations to the victim, the victim's family or their community. To express this it is important to avoid language suggesting that, through contrition before God, a person “wipes their slate clean” or in any similar metaphor renders their situation as if the sin had not happened. This is not the situation for victims. It could even be stated that a consequence of being right with God would be a desire of a perpetrator to meet their obligations to any victims.<br /><br />Some objectors to this might raise passages such as Psalm 41 which led me to this topic in my last post, as if they “proved” God is the only offended party to sin. A careful reading however reminds us that Psalm 41 is simply a prayer made by King David. King David’s self-serving belief that God is the only one he has sinned against should come as no surprise from such a flawed character. It is an example of an appeal to cheap grace from someone who consistently tries to play God like a slot machine. In 2 Samuel:12 we see David employing contrition towards God in a frankly cynical way (while sadly God in patriarchal fashion punishes David through his child). David is supposed to be read as a dick and there’s no reason even a biblical fundamentalist has to assume he gets God perfectly.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />No biblical Christian is justified using Psalm 41 as instruction over the more relevant Matthew 5:23-24. Here Jesus separates out making oneself right with God, through temple sacrifices, and making oneself right with another person. Jesus puts the latter first as a requirement of the former, reversing the normal hierarchy of importance. It is presented as if approaching God for forgiveness of sin makes no sense while in conflict with one’s “brother or sister.” This is a position that is radically at odds with David’s God-alone strategy of seeking forgiveness.<br /><br /><i>“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you,<b><sup>&nbsp;</sup></b>leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.”<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What does this say about the nature of God and sin? I find the idea of a God who refuses to be used to clear someone’s slate while they continue to offend others a powerful one. It is certainly an empowering one for victims.<br /><br />One of the recommendations of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse is that the Catholic church removes the promise of secrecy from the rite of confession in matters involving child victims. This has been initially rejected by the Church hierarchy in Australia. If we accept that genuine forgiveness of sins requires the victims engagement and in cases of child abuse the community is also the victim, then the position of the Catholic church should be that absolution is always withheld unless a confession of sexual abuse is also made to the police. It follows then that, even if the secrecy of the confession is held to by the church, priests can be prevented from practicing as priests after confessing to sexual abuse. They either accept criminal prosecution or they must be considered unrepentant of a mortal sin by their peers and cannot officiate mass.<br /><br />This may seem like an unnecessarily convoluted thought process to reach a simple conclusion; You can’t just go to God (or God’s representative), obtain your forgiveness and then your victims must catch up to the new reality of your sinlessness. Any path to atonement with God is rather through a genuine encounter with the reality of your victims and all the resulting consequences of that. Anything else is cheap grace at their expense. At times I have felt that discussing the theology of how this works is more words than needed but I have had the words of Denhollander in mind:<br /><br />“But often, if not always, people are motivated by poor theology and a poor understanding of grace and repentance and that causes them to handle sexual assault in a way where that (sic) a lot of predators go unchecked, often for decades. When you see a theological commitment to handling sexual assault inappropriately, you have the least hope of ever changing it.”<br /><br />And so we must first change the theologies of sin and forgiveness that don't put victims first.<br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-45145082441959137522018-01-20T18:32:00.000-08:002018-01-21T14:30:24.315-08:00Against whom have I sinned?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BnE3DbC-muE/WmP7in2AsYI/AAAAAAAABr4/JUFBHPqq1zEXOW9OABCMAPFc3kQY6CHaACLcBGAs/s1600/i-have-sinned-17-638.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="638" height="187" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BnE3DbC-muE/WmP7in2AsYI/AAAAAAAABr4/JUFBHPqq1zEXOW9OABCMAPFc3kQY6CHaACLcBGAs/s320/i-have-sinned-17-638.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Psalm 51 is a prayer of the Jewish King David. His rule, if such a person existed, would have been about 1000 BCE and is considered a Golden Age of ancient Jewish civilization. This is the same David who, in his most famous legend, slays Goliath with a sling. In Psalm 51 (included below) he prays to God for mercy. As he does so David expresses particular views about sin which I heard quoted by the contemporary theologian D.A. Carson, causing me to revisit this psalm.<br /><br /><a href="https://tollelege.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/god-is-always-the-most-offended-by-d-a-carson/">D.A. Carson stated</a> that in every occasion of sin, God is the primary (David says only) offended party. As the primary or only offended party (and this distinction in effect isn’t clear)&nbsp; God has the moral right to punish sinners and the capacity to pardon them independently of any human victims. King David in Psalm 51 asks God to be cleansed of his sin like contemporary Christians are invited to do, with the full confidence that this is God’s prerogative. God could not do this unless they were functionally the only offended party; another could still righteously pass their own judgment.<br /><br />The first point I want to make about this theology is that much depends on what is meant by “offended” when we say God is an offended party to sin. One way this has been understood is that sin is a breaking of God’s rules and that this offence of disobedience is the way in which God is offended. If this is the way God’s offence is understood then it should raise some questions. How could the person of God be more offended for having their commands disobeyed over the direct victim of an assault for example? If sexual harassment occurred in a workplace would we say that the boss, whose rules for workplace conduct have been transgressed, is the most offended party? Imagine such a boss informing the victim that they have forgiven the perpetrator so everything is good now. We would understandably balk at this. Even though we should recognise that the boss has independently been betrayed by the harassing employee and could independently insist on punishment they are certainly not the only offended party. The victim of the harassment has an independent claim for restitution or punishment.<br /><br /><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mjSPDGxJr_Q/WmP6FgcRfEI/AAAAAAAABrs/D4JY4Pw5xK01jg0lrfq8vt30hZ9w6nTmgCLcBGAs/s1600/doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="960" height="132" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mjSPDGxJr_Q/WmP6FgcRfEI/AAAAAAAABrs/D4JY4Pw5xK01jg0lrfq8vt30hZ9w6nTmgCLcBGAs/s200/doll.jpg" width="200" /></a>Another way of understanding God as the offended party is to state that we, along with all creation, are God’s property. Thus any transgression against us is against our author/owner rather than ourselves. If I enter your house and destroy your couch there can be no sense that the couch is an offended party. Only you are. Consistently if a person decides to destroy their own couch then there is no offence at all. To accept this paradigm, where God is the functionally only offended party by virtue of our possession by God, is to deny our personhood. (Moral personhood is a term for how&nbsp; a person is delineated from a thing in morality.)&nbsp; I condemn as barbaric when harm to children or wives counts only as harm to their patriarch (and owner) in some cultural circumstances. I insist upon the moral personhood of all. Are we supposed to accept via an analagous patriarchal logic that as children of God we have no independent personhood?<br /><br />It should be acknowledged that to say we are not people in relation to another human person, is not the same thing as saying we are not a person in relation to God. God is not a citizen and can only symbolically inhabit a human throne. There is a kind of political equality in declaring that all, rather than just some, human beings are not moral persons. It is however a political equality of tenuous security. The offence of killing us is only dependant on God being offended by that killing. Large sections of the human population believe in a Bible that proclaims men who have sex with men, practitioners of witchcraft and children who disrespect their parents as right to be killed according to God. If we accept the paradigm of sin in which we are God’s property then any argument against such murder (even that it should be called murder) can only be an argument over whether that is actually what God wants. Which of us wants to go toe to toe with a fundamentalist to assert our humanity with no avenue to our inalienable personhood?<br /><br />God as the functionally only offended party to sin is not peripheral to Christianity. The complete forgiveness of sins by the cross depends upon it. We have seen two ways Gods' position can be understood that should disturb us. Neither honours the victim with their full self-worth. It is reasonable to wonder whether these understandings of sin and God contributed to the catastrophic failure in some church institutions of their responsibility to young people in their care. Did they simply forget the victim was an offended party? Did they seek forgiveness from the boss only? It is also pertinent to ask, as a society with largely Christian roots, whether these understandings have expressions in our broader politic. The violence of colonization is sometimes excused by the greater glory of the nation. The cruelty of offshore detention is unseen because its victims are nobody’s property. How do we all under represent the victim in our understanding of wrong doing?<br /><br />When we look at Christians practicing their faith we find many who recently exposed their churches corruption and have stood up for victims of abuse. We find a great number of the people who condemned and punished the violence of Australia’s colonization in our history were driven by their Christian faith. We find many Christians today at the forefront of trying to inject some compassion into Australia’s immigration debates. This leaves us with our last question, worthy of its own separate discussion; Are these Christians simply avoiding the logic of their own faith or do they have a different understanding of God as the only offended party of sin which doesn’t diminish the human victims? Is it possible that through an understanding of incarnation perhaps, these Christians avoid treating human people and God as separate persons who compete for our attention when addressing sin. Do they conceptually combine God and victim into one? I suspect this is so and I hope to find the opportunity to present this possibility to my Christian friends. I’ll tell you what they say. Hopefully they can give me the language to express their understanding to you.<br /><br />___________________________________________________________________________<br /><br />Psalm 51<br /><br />1 Have mercy on me, O God,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; according to your unfailing love;<br />according to your great compassion<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; blot out my transgressions.<br />2 Wash away all my iniquity<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and cleanse me from my sin.<br />3 For I know my transgressions,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and my sin is always before me.<br /><b>4 Against you, you only, have I sinned</b><br /><b>&nbsp; &nbsp; and done what is evil in your sight;</b><br />so you are right in your verdict<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and justified when you judge.<br />5 Surely I was sinful at birth,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; sinful from the time my mother conceived me.<br />6 Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; you taught me wisdom in that secret place.<br />7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.<br />8 Let me hear joy and gladness;<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; let the bones you have crushed rejoice.<br />9 Hide your face from my sins<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and blot out all my iniquity.<br />10 Create in me a pure heart, O God,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and renew a steadfast spirit within me.<br />11 Do not cast me from your presence<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; or take your Holy Spirit from me.<br />12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.<br />13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; so that sinners will turn back to you.<br />14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; you who are God my Savior,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.<br />15 Open my lips, Lord,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; and my mouth will declare your praise.<br />16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.<br />17 My sacrifice, O God, is[b] a broken spirit;<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; a broken and contrite heart<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; you, God, will not despise.<br />18 May it please you to prosper Zion,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; to build up the walls of Jerusalem.<br />19 Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; in burnt offerings offered whole;<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; then bulls will be offered on your altar.<br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-49550172307960799412017-12-09T18:20:00.003-08:002017-12-10T01:17:57.529-08:00Who voted no to marriage equality?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z2N3Jv1KnhU/WiyZZDB2khI/AAAAAAAABqA/iFOT-upj4g068m8x3_VrMtAzA6HLm2oawCLcBGAs/s1600/novotenoface.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="638" height="220" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z2N3Jv1KnhU/WiyZZDB2khI/AAAAAAAABqA/iFOT-upj4g068m8x3_VrMtAzA6HLm2oawCLcBGAs/s400/novotenoface.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><br />The Australian Federal parliament has removed the gender restrictions from the law regulating marriage, instantly recognizing the marriages of same sex couples married overseas and enabling others to marry here. This is something I am thrilled about and yet I find myself wanting to express sympathy for “no voters” (people who voted against marriage equality in the recent national postal survey). This isn’t my first attempt to do so. My piece titled <i><a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/so-many-points-of-no-return.html">So many points of no return</a></i> tried to acknowledge the significant distress marriage equality would cause some no voters without conceding such distress is justified.&nbsp; My <a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/is-view-that-homosexuality-is-sin.html">most recent post</a> tried to illustrate how even the view that nobody should have gay sex is not necessarily hateful, although I strongly disagree with this view. In this piece I want to specifically critique the othering of no voters. While still wishing they’d voted yes I don’t think of no voters as another type of person to me and my kind. This othering, when I witness it, indicates to me a deep mischaracterization of who no voters are. It’s also affecting how yes voters view themselves in a profoundly unhealthy way.<br /><br />38.4% of eligible voters who participated in the postal survey to permit same sex couples to marry, voted no. For some people this was astonishing and while a majority yes vote felt great they couldn’t understand how so many people could see same sex relationships as so inferior they wouldn’t allow them to get married. This however is the harshest possible way to understand no votes – as a condemnation of same sex love. If the vote had of been a simple “Should the law reflect the opinion that gay relationships are wrong” such a position would have had very little support. The official No vote campaign knew this and made sure the discussion was about anything else other than a direct condemnation of gay people.<br /><br />A more accurate understanding of no voters would acknowledge that some of those voters were simply cautious, inclined to vote&nbsp; no for any change. Such voters are why it is always difficult to pass any referendum in this country regardless of the opinion polls. The presence of such voters was supposed to be a real asset to the no campaign and was why people like Abbott pushed for a plebiscite. The more like a referendum the vote seemed, the more momentous the change appeared, and the more cautious voters who would vote no regardless of the issue. These are the voters who are swayed by the non-argument that we can’t know what will happen. The no campaign reminded these voters that heterosexual marriage has been around for eons, that it is a fundamental element of society and changing it… well…. I’ll leave that to your imagination. You can think of these voters as voters with generally pessimistic imaginations. I don’t share that pessimism in this regard but I do understand it. I myself like to be a second generation adopter of technology – to let the guinea pigs go first . I feel vindicated by every health and environmental scare caused by a product like Teflon or&nbsp; Polar fleece. Now that change has happened these cautious voters are increasingly going to exhale and accept the sky has not fallen. Most will wait and see but few will push for a reversal of marriage equality. Some will already be supporting it as the new status quo. Who can say what will happen if we change things back?<br /><br />An even stronger support for marriage equality would be found, now, amongst the no voters who were only against change to the marriage act because it was a bother. These are the people who have zero interest in gay rights either to oppose them or support them. Although we can suspect that Bob Katter harbours some homophobia, by his own words he is happy for gay love to bloom but has bigger fish, or crocodiles to be precise, to fry. Some people sharing this sentiment would have voted yes in the postal survey, just to get the bloody thing over with, but some would have voted no as a punishment for the time they feel has been wasted on the matter of same sex marriage already. We can expect that now the issue has been voted on publicly and in parliament such no voters would have no interest at all in revisiting it. They would punish any politician who re-opens the issue whether conservative or not. They are not a base a conservative movement can build on.<br /><br />A third group of no voters are those I call the “Because you asked” no voter. Many of these no voters wouldn’t normally make a big deal over homosexuality, in fact some might prefer never to mention it. Some would be happy to be friends with gay people, work for or with them and could support the claim that they “don’t have a problem with it” with multiple examples of not running around screaming “this one’s gay.” This group doesn’t think gay relationships are exactly equal to heterosexual ones. Some of them might think gay couples shouldn’t be raising kids but are otherwise equal. Some might have a lingering doubt that gayness is healthy and maybe they hope none of their kids turn out to be gay. Some might even have the view that homosexuality is like a mild mental illness, generally harmless but not to be encouraged, akin to a philia for vinyl records. I’m not trying to sugarcoat these views as decent ones. They are patronizing and ignorant and make life more of a drudge for all involved, especially queer kids. They warrant being labeled homophobic. But they don’t constitute the mentality of an army prepared to undo marriage equality or a group of people you could say “hate” gay people. Yes, if another public vote occurred they would probably vote no again but it would be “because you asked” and until such time the matter won’t be raised by them.<br /><br />If you are dismayed that a portion of people have this sort of soft distrust of gayness then I have to wonder what kind of a charmed life you have lived. Thirty years ago this attitude was the most many gay people felt they could hope for from their friends and families, let alone their churches. This was the world in which in 1984 Elton John got married to Renate Blauel. Remember that when Ellen Page, an actress whose fans are predominantly young and hip, came out as lesbian in 2014 there was still the fear she was trashing her career. The mood had changed though. The cognitive distance between the don’t ask, don’t tell philosophy of the 80’s and marriage equality is huge. What’s remarkable to me is how many people have crossed this distance over three decades. This group was never a bedrock of support for the no camp and I believe the no campaigns’ loss in the postal survey was largely due to crumbling historical support from this group. You could call that the Magda effect.<br /><br />Then there are the hard no’s. These people may punish their representative at the next election for voting for marriage equality. These voters are going to push for ways to constrain and contain this social change. As private citizens, they don’t recognize same-sex marriages, and many want to ensure as much as possible that they don’t have to when acting professionally either. Even this group can’t be considered to be an homogeneous group. Some of this group would be adamant that protections for gay people in employment or in receipt of services should be maintained – outside of wedding services. Some would be those who advocated for civil unions instead of marriage equality. They would include those who wanted to find any solution to the difficulties gay people face in being treated equally short of permitting them to marry. Under scrutiny almost all of this group are not inclined to see same sex attraction as healthy or “of god” in the same way as heterosexual relationships, but not all of this group should be tarred with the same brush as the next and final category of no voter.<br /><br />Lastly we come to the true haters. These include the ones whose self-hate has been cultivated in the dark of their own closet. They want others to know how disgusting they find gay sex is by describing all their extensive research into it, especially the bottoms. They think gay people are an invention of Communism through Hollywood and that you are the idiot for not seeing it. With a cavalier attitude to mixing historical analogies these people also refer to the Gay Gestapo and Rainbow Nazis as the vanguard of Cultural Marxism. Such people exist. They are real. They vote. They will be the continued core of an extreme-right conservative movement. But they are not 40% of the Australian population. I suspect they are less than 10%. Maybe less than 5%<br /><br />5% is still enough to win Senate seats after preferences. 5% hatred in a population is hardly something to stick on a tourism brochure. It’s just not a group the major parties can court openly. When we imagine that all the 38.4% who voted no belong to this group of haters we massively inflate the power of this group. We support the narrative that Cory Bernardi wants to sell – that there are a large number of disaffected conservatives who will rally to him to create a viable third force in Australian politics. We create for ourselves, as activists wanting to support a post-heteronormative world, an overwhelming enemy. We depress our confidence in our communities and for no good reason.<br /><br />The flip side of imagining all no voters as part of this hater group is that yes voters can see themselves as an equally homogenous but holy group. Yes voters can be broken up into as many categories as no voters. Some of them will be people who have worked for a long time to break down prejudice against same sex relationships. Some will have ticked this box as a continuation of standing up for their own relationships or the relationships of others close to them. But some yes voters will have barely thought about heterosexual privilege and their yes vote will be the first and last act they expect to make to dismantle it. Some yes voters will have voted so that they can stop hearing about homosexuality. For people confronting&nbsp; the condemnation of same sex attraction and those who experience it, it is a nice fantasy to imagine that 61.6% of Australian voters have our back. It’s not necessarily true. Reality is a lot more complex. In two years time people who voted either yes or no may even have changed their minds.<br /><br />Recognising this changeable and complex reality is especially important when understanding the way in which country of origin impacted on people’s votes in the postal survey. Individuals who having voted yes feel entitled to make sweeping generalizations about areas with high no votes are indulging a fantasy in which they get to be white knights rescuing queer people from their oppressors. Yet the only rescuing act that was made was a tick in a box and a walk to the post office. The thin veil of righteousness over racist and classist remarks is undeserved self-congratulation. Magda Szubanski by contrast has already indicated that after a long justified rest she wants to take the time to listen and build relationships with people in the communities which overwhelmingly voted no. Those who want to create change with her will likewise need to embrace a layered understanding of who voted no and yes for marriage equality.<br /><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-85828293883838911652017-09-01T21:40:00.000-07:002017-09-03T18:10:15.393-07:00Is it hateful to believe that having sex with someone of the same sex is always wrong?Consider the belief that people should <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOotsq4soug">only have sex if they are wearing a hat</a>. This belief holds that sex where any member is not wearing a hat is always morally wrong. Sex with a hat might be morally wrong in some other way but a hat on the head of all participants is an essential requirement of a sex act being morally ok.<br /><br />Now you might consider this belief silly. You might reject it out of hand as absurd. I contend that you cannot find this belief to be hateful. There isn’t any hate for any one behind it.<br /><br />You could claim that the application of this belief is likely to be unfair and even cruel. Poor people who are less likely to own hats are going to be more heavily restricted by this belief than rich people with a hat for every boudoir. People with some physical disabilities might curse this belief every time they struggle to put a hat on, if they even can. Other people will find following this rule a breeze. But this unfairness in application does not necessarily make the belief hateful. At most we could say this belief is not very “woke” to its justice implications but I would still argue it is not a hateful belief in itself.<br /><br />If this belief was widespread we would expect to see something; People with hate for others seizing on this belief to amplify and justify their hate. The desire to have sex regardless of a hat would be patholigised so that people with that desire could be seen as sick people, not to be trusted in many ways. People who have sex without hats ( a category that would earn both a medical name and a few derogatory slurs to call its own) would be denied jobs or the opportunity to formalize their relationships with the result that hatlessness in bed would be connected to criminality and promiscuity, justifying the discrimination. At the peak of this belief there would be a legal defence for murdering someone who wants to have sex without a hat and the police would barely bother to investigate the deaths of such people. Such people would be the butt of numerous jokes and stereotypical depictions. And far from the corridors of institutional power “Your mother doesn’t own a hat” would be a schoolyard taunt that always led to blows.<br /><br />The institutionalized hate around this belief would make it difficult to separate the belief itself from all the prejudices and priveleges of its proponents. Indeed there would be no easy agreement on what was the hate and what was just the belief. Is a program to remind people to wear hats in bed using shock treatment and prayer born of hateful discrimination or misguided love? Arguments would go on about how to understand these programs. Such confusion, however, does not mean the original belief itself is hateful. There are people full of hate who have found this belief useful to them (and we can reflect on whether that utility is in the nature of any legalistic moral claim) but there could be people who hold none of the hate who still hold the belief in its entirety. It is simply incorrect to call them hateful too.<br /><br />You’ve probably realized the metaphor I’m making by now. We live in a world in which some people believe that sex that isn’t between a man and a woman is always morally wrong. They believe there are many ways that sex between a man and a woman can also be morally wrong but the presence of the two genders is a necessary requirement for the sex act to ever be morally ok. This belief can be cruel in its application – people who don’t feel any homosexual desire follow it with ease unlike others who only feel homosexual desire. The belief certainly has been used by hateful people to justify their hate in all the ways I mentioned such views can. But I would still argue that the belief itself is not necessarily hateful.<br /><br />This is important to realize. We are in the middle of a national debate on the merits of opening our civil rite of marriage up to same sex couples. At the moment civil marriage in Australia requires the participants to be male and female. For some people to remove this requirement would be to “e<a href="http://www.simoncamilleri.com/why-i-will-vote-no-rev-neil-chambers/">ndorse sin</a>” at a national level and this forms the motivation of many no voters in the postal survey we may be having (the High Court challenge is yet to decide if it will proceed). I disagree with this view of sin. Its just silly to me to make heterosexuality a moral requirement of sex and a distraction from the real issues around love, mutual flourishing and consent. Still, I don’t think their idea that sex must be between a man and a woman is necessarily hateful and I wont join in labeling them as such.<br /><br />There’s more I could say on this but I need to finish up. I think we need to be able to hear other people say “homosexuality is always wrong” in the same way we might hear them say “masturbation is always wrong” or “sex before marriage is always wrong.” That is, to disagree but not necessarily be offended. There will be some who are aiming to be hurtful and spread hate. Most wont be aware of how unfair they are being although some may well be. But the ideas themselves can be held by people who are loving, as hard as that may be to understand.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-23427752569242023732017-07-03T19:10:00.002-07:002017-07-04T01:08:58.938-07:00Wonder Woman: A political, philosophical and theological review part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-itKmbOdcoHk/WVr201fzz0I/AAAAAAAABn0/pYaNvi_HvPcmchViJwgV7uFb2V2vjhZYACLcBGAs/s1600/wonderwoman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="640" height="210" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-itKmbOdcoHk/WVr201fzz0I/AAAAAAAABn0/pYaNvi_HvPcmchViJwgV7uFb2V2vjhZYACLcBGAs/s400/wonderwoman.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />In Patty Jenkins’ 2017 blockbuster film, Wonder Woman is born with a specific holy purpose; she opposes the evil of Aries and restores humanity to their created nature. Throughout her story she brushes aside the suggestion that removing Aries won’t end all war, let alone the war around her. &nbsp;She is certain his destruction will instantaneously cause soldiers to drop their weapons as if stepping out of an enchantment. While there is an element of comedy to such an unsophisticated world view, Wonder Women’s is a naivety we can’t fully scoff at. After all, the truth she needs to learn instead, is deeply collectively embarrassing for us, as well as a truth that endangers hope. Her belief that Aries alone is why humans act with depravity towards each other not only lets us off the hook, it offers a simple path to victory. It is not too different to the naiveties we often embrace ourselves.<br /><br />The most obvious real world parallel to Wonder Woman’s perspective is a childlike view of the devil. According to some biblical interpretations the world is in the devil’s thrall, handed over by God to be their hunting ground as they “roam about like a hungry lion” (1 Peter 5:8). Only those who are strong in their Lord Jesus, who trumps the devil, can protect themselves from the devil’s possession. This is a fantasy that all the world faces one opponent in disguise. Worse still, this can be read in reverse to declare any opposition to either faith or just familial authority, as coming from this evil one. This simplistic idea of human evil is what we read about it in some terrible tale of a family exorcism that kills a child or in the experienced of other victims of religious abuse declared by their families as taken in by the devil. Sophisticated clever people, religious as well, scoff at the ignorance of such a totalising world view in a way that the Wonder Woman movie could be seen as encouraging.<br /><br />But politics, secular politics too, is full of equally simple naiveties. The lure of simple singular enemies is strong. One such foe, patriarchy, is touched upon in the Wonder Woman narrative. If only women ran the world, maybe life could be as idyllic as a Mediterranean paradise. For some feminists of the time and setting of the film, the hoped for effect of women voting was an end to war. For some later feminists the Age of Aries with its male symbolism is supposed to be replaced by the Age of Aquarius and an ascendancy of “feminine values”. Demonstrably the inclusion of women in politics can and does improve the world, increasing the political viability of peace, the valuing of the environment and the funding of education especially for girls. Society after society has shown this. Defenders of patriarchy are peddling a disproven medicine. But there is also a naïve overreach in the hope that only patriarchy needs to be overcome for utopia to emerge.<br /><br />The optimism that an all-women’s collective will have no toxic politics, or that lesbian relationships will be free of domestic violence, or that a female politician will be incorrigible, is an attractive fantasy. It gives us a simple path forward to a peaceful and just world. I remember hearing when young the speculation that generations from now we could become a humanity of one sex, reproducing asexually through technology and subsequently no longer containing our ancient code for violence in male DNA. But such utopian speculation sets us up for disappointment similar to the disappointment felt by Wonder Woman when human peace was unlinked to Aries’ death. Women betray women, just as men betray men. Gender, with respect to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monique_Wittig">Monique Wittig</a>, is primarily a set of relations between two classes and in the absence of sex to mark gender lines, new lines are created to create new classes. The partial truth at least of this can be confirmed by anyone who attended a single sex school. Biological sex is not necessary to divide the school into valued/unvalued, privileged/oppressed, key/peripheral, “male”/”female”. A single sex world is likely to simply gender itself anyway.<br /><br />For my part I like to blame capitalism. I want to locate all our horrible dealings with each other as outworking of this system that commodifies everything from knowledge to fun and ultimately turns people themselves into mere capital. Racism, sexism, the destruction of the environment can all be seen as bolstered by capitalism. But just like patriarchy, capitalism is only a form evil takes. The Jonestown practice of apostolic socialism had terrible problems but none of them can be fairly attributed to capitalism. The mass murder of Jonestown members including many children is often mistakenly referred to as a suicide although it is uncertain how many chose in any way to drink poison. Certainly no infant chose anything and we know others felt they had no choice. Multiple other disappointments with the utopia of post-capitalism exist as well. Certainly figures like Stalin and institutions like the KGB show us that great cruelty can thrive in societies that reject capitalism.<br /><br />Whenever we move beyond our initial naivety we are left with two choices. We are right to feel a sense of betrayal and even heartbreak. A promise of an easy victory has been broken. The Catholic Church represents such a broken promise for many who grew up there and were told that the faith was a refuge for children. So too does the Queer community for anyone who has been screwed over there despite the profession of family, while left wing activism has its own internal conflicts despite the songs of solidarity. Religions and political affiliations which cast our problems as having a singular identity inevitably come to wear the villain’s hat as well. Why not condemn everything as pointless and equally bad?<br /><br />This option is put to Wonder Woman in the film. After moving beyond the first naivety that human society would become perfect without Aries, a second naivety is proposed by Aries - that all humanity is to be condemned and the best we can hope for is its destruction. The first movement is a movement beyond simple faith but a second movement has to be made to go beyond disillusionment with everything. It can be a return to a different simplicity. We can lurch from one solution to another as if now we know what fixes humanity but I consider this a disgenuine denial of reality. I don’t think Wonder Woman ends up in that place.<br /><br />Wonder Woman knows that any blow she strikes will never be decisive. We who have made a similar journey out of simple faith know that any change we make to society will never be entirely enough. We know there isn’t any absolute refuge from evil. Church communities, activist communities, alternative economic systems, retreats to family or tradition, will never be perfect and will always have the potential to be abused and to let us down. If faith is faith in something as a perfect solution, then we have entered an acceptance of no-faith and yet we do not give up on humanity. <br /><br />Society is not utterly depraved and in the struggle to do the right thing improvements are made. Even if no improvements occur this is not necessarily what engages us. Humanity, with its moments of kindness and passion, its concern and its actions of self-sacrifice, captures Diana’s imagination as it should capture our own. If those moments are fleeting and constantly swallowed up by greater evil it simply becomes even more necessary that we become involved in order to sustain them that bit longer. This is the sort of faith that embraces its own folly, which acknowledges it can’t win in any final way. Diana, as Wonder Woman, ends the film still a hero in our own time, 100 years later, presumably having seen both World War Two and the Cold War follow Aries’ demise.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kh1ybKuH5as/WVr2P-sBttI/AAAAAAAABnw/RzBujdcUpxsBWS5rB4Cwo4FZl9i09XNPQCLcBGAs/s1600/wonder-woman-dr-maru-1002607-320x180.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kh1ybKuH5as/WVr2P-sBttI/AAAAAAAABnw/RzBujdcUpxsBWS5rB4Cwo4FZl9i09XNPQCLcBGAs/s1600/wonder-woman-dr-maru-1002607-320x180.png" /></a></div>I want to particularly mention the scene where Wonder woman forgives the poisoner, Dr. Maru, rather than destroy her. This could be construed as Wonder Woman putting her faith in love or forgiveness in a way that was completely in-congruent with all the killing she did to get to that point. I agree this would be in-congruent but I don’t think Wonder Woman does make this act of faith, at least not in the sense that a pacifist does. This is one moment where the idea of no-faith or faith that acknowledges its folly is necessary to understand her actions. Wonder Woman, post her movement beyond naivety, engages in violence with no faith that this violence will be conclusive and in mercy also with no faith that this act concludes anything. In this sense she has moved beyond her destiny as god-killer, or the identity Aries offers her as God, and stands alongside the rest of humanity.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-14642971834836870922017-06-12T21:41:00.000-07:002017-06-13T02:53:28.980-07:00Wonder Woman: A political, philosophical and theological review Part 1.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I6Lxy1NBpnI/WT9sxHW67LI/AAAAAAAABnM/a0lYInaNzMEfwhwag0AJbXT0kydAZad1gCLcB/s1600/wonder-woman-hed-2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="1320" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I6Lxy1NBpnI/WT9sxHW67LI/AAAAAAAABnM/a0lYInaNzMEfwhwag0AJbXT0kydAZad1gCLcB/s400/wonder-woman-hed-2017.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />This post contains spoilers for the 2017 Wonder Woman movie. Loving the craft of movies as I do, I don’t want to spoil a good one and Wonder Woman, without needing to call it a classic of cinema, is a good one. Come back after you’ve watched the movie. Even if you have to wait for the DVD this will still be here.<br /><br />This isn’t intended to be a general review of Wonder Woman. I’m only going to focus on what I see as the substantial political, philosophical and theological content of the film. In one quick aside though, Wonder Woman deserves to be complimented on the contrasting use of colour between Diana’s bright birthplace and “the world of Men”. &nbsp;I wish we’d lingered in the sunlight for longer – the tendency of modern films to shoot so much in shadow annoys me – but I get the point they were trying to make. The world of WW1, and Industrialisation as grey, muddy and smogfilled makes sense. That was just one of many clever film making choices of this movie.<br /><br />The gender politics deserve special mention. Even if this wasn’t the first blockbuster superhero film directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins, and the first mainstream success of the sub-genre with a female lead (The 1984 Supergirl movie by comparison returned <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088206/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus">less than half its production budget</a> in ticket sales), the setting of the film with its Amazonian idyllism in contrast with WW1 before women got the vote in England, put gender front and centre in the film. For me two points stood out. The male allies of Wonder Woman stand as testaments to the brokenness of the world &nbsp;she has entered. Their depictions are sympathetic and complex. Many male lead action movies have treated their female side characters as having far less depth. As a male I particularly liked viewing men in a softening role, helping the action hero to not lose themselves in god-like power by reminding them of their humanity, ironically in Wonder Woman’s case. I might grow tired of seeing my gender cast that way a hundred times over in some alternative reality but as a change it was more than refreshing. In fact, it felt healing. There has been a lot of ink over how empowering it is to see a strong female on screen but seeing softness in male characters, in the action genre, was an equally rare delight.<br /><br />Secondly I do not think it is too great a stretch to suggest that the films treatment of sex and sexuality owes a lot to the considered gender politics of the film. Wonder Woman was originally written by a man with a penchant for female sexual dominance. Her original character was strong and fierce but also for her time very sexual, often either tying others up or being tied up herself while, again for her time, scantily clad. Much has also been said about the inadequacies of women’s attire in both superhero and fantasy genres and Wonder Woman’s corsetry and hot pants never bucked that trend. With this back story and context and in today’s time when sexualized violence against women in shows like Game of Thrones is a proven seller Patty Jenkins could have chosen to have capitulated to such trends. Catwoman with Halle Berry did just this by practically reducing that character to a walking butt shot and it was punished commercially for its lack of depth. Alternatively Wonder Woman could have skirted any controversy by avoiding all hint of sexuality &nbsp;in the film, and making no overt reference to either the politics of modesty or overt sexuality, as the Wonder Woman tv show and orginal comics did. &nbsp;Patty Jenkins chose neither.<br /><br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O96PtbilBbw/WT9mPIP8d6I/AAAAAAAABmw/c7YCk4vJzSYNBIfIVO-p7hw5Wg5w2BUBgCLcB/s1600/Spartan_hoplite-1_from_Vinkhuijzen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="By The collection assembled by H. J. Vinkhuijzen (1843-1910). See: [2] - New York Public Library (NYPL) digital gallery: [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2904013" border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="306" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O96PtbilBbw/WT9mPIP8d6I/AAAAAAAABmw/c7YCk4vJzSYNBIfIVO-p7hw5Wg5w2BUBgCLcB/s320/Spartan_hoplite-1_from_Vinkhuijzen.jpg" title="" width="160" /></a><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gAQolRH0vws/WT9l5Sj6kwI/AAAAAAAABms/GHtHCEaejdg9BeLb7q034y6lCWSUr4CcwCLcB/s1600/zena2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="602" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gAQolRH0vws/WT9l5Sj6kwI/AAAAAAAABms/GHtHCEaejdg9BeLb7q034y6lCWSUr4CcwCLcB/s200/zena2.jpg" width="160" /></a>The films cleverness lies in tackling the issue of sexualized female heroines head on. The immodesty by early 20th century standards of her costume is treated as a comment on the prudishness of such a society and its effect on woman’s capacity to move is exposed. When Wonder Woman attempts to kick while wearing one dress there are unhelpful gasps at the revelation of her bloomers and the womanly attire she is given to wear is ultimately deemed inadequate for fighting. Mary Wollstonecraft in her vindication of the Rights of Woman would agree. This point is aided by the fact that Wonder Woman's armour has a practicality to it. &nbsp;Crucially her guts are protected, exactly what armour in Ancient Greece was designed for and like Wonder Woman, the Ancient Greeks did not generally use leg or arm protection. The bare midriff that Zena the warrior princess sometimes wore is nowhere, thankfully, to be seen.<br /><br />Perhaps best of all in terms of gender politics is how clearly the film depicts Diana’s agency regarding sexuality in a way that also includes the audiences relationship with her character. When Diana sleeps with Steve Trevor the initiative is hers and Steve is clearly shown to consent but then that is the extent to which our voyeurism is permitted. This is not sex for us the audience in the way that HBO practically guarantees a woman will be stripped to the waist in every episode but sex as part of Wonder Womans control over herself. I’m not saying that nudity is in any way always negative in story telling. Nudity can be funny. Nudity can be powerful. Nudity can be incidental or tragic. Nudity however can also titillate. Titilation, also not necessarily a bad thing, shapes audience relationships with characters so that they are there for us, not merely in the context of the story, but in a seperate context of our own sexuality. I was thrilled with a directorial decision that meant Wonder Woman was a sexual being without our relationship to her as viewers being sexualized in any way. Thankfully the particular combination of titilation along with violence against women was a mistake the film never came close to. Too often directors emphasis the vileness of a villain by showing them molesting a women, especially a heroine, in a way that is not accidentally erotic for audiences and which affects our relationship as fans to that character.<br /><br />In a few brush strokes the film even holds up to the viewer the divisions of race and class between the gender of men. The deep respect of the Native American character in the film, nicknamed Chief, played by <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/wonder-woman-eugene-brave-rock-1.4148722">the actor Eugene Brave Rock</a>, when Wonder Woman speaks to him in his native Blackfoot language is palpable. The poignancy when Chief points out that his land was taken by the people of Steve Trevor is real. This character and this interplay could have been dropped from the film without changing the story much. I am so glad it wasn’t however. Besides being a rare respectful portrayal of first nations people in US cinema, it adds a richness to the location of the story in time and an understanding of feminist and patriarchal history that goes beyond the cartoon idea of bad men. Race and class in contemporary politics confound simple caricatures &nbsp;of women=victims/saviours, men = powerful/oppressors. This film, with its basis in comics, could have stayed with such a cartoon analysis, for cheap effect, but didn’t. By going beyond, it gave Wonder Woman that feminism that goes hand in hand with tackling all injustices, in which women’s equality is a necessary part but not the end of making the world a better place.<br /><br />My comments so far were originally only intended to be introductory for another discussion. The way this film deals with human evil and with the concept of judgment has a lot to teach us. Instead I found I had more than just a few things I wanted to say about Wonder Woman’s treatment of gender. Consequently I’m going to leave those thoughts about evil for a second post. As always I would love to hear your comments on what I’ve said so far. Do you disagree? Were there other elements of the films gender politics you consider worth mentioning? Would you rate the film less favourably? Feel free to comment below.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-84395650824962581632017-05-08T05:30:00.000-07:002017-05-08T05:30:23.810-07:00We need fair micro-credit solutions.I have friends who, when bad luck strikes, have been forced to take out credit card loans. Every single article I have read or consumer advice show I have watched has warned me this is a terrible idea. Those friends however are disinclined to accept any direct financial assistance from my partner and I instead. I get that there are solid cultural reasons for this. I believe we can overcome, or maybe circumvent such reasons, with positive micro-credit systems.<br /><br />We view direct transfers of money between friends as problematic. If your mate helps you out with a lift you might give them money “for petrol” as a way of diminishing the act of payment. If they help you fix your door (which friends have done for us) then you’ll often have a better chance of paying them with food or alcohol than you will putting money in their hand. The exchange of money can transform a relationship into employer/employee or service provider to customer. Those relationships can overlap with friendships but they also come with their own kinds of expectations. We are friends with our mechanic. But when he operates as our mechanic we expect a certain standard of service and he expects prompt payment. <br /><br />The problem is sometimes we need money. In such situations we are culturally predisposed not to solve our problems in our communities with our closest allies. Instead we go to banks and when we lack the collateral to secure a bank loan we take out credit card loans, hoping we can pay them back before the above 20% interest rate kicks in. And we pay high fees for the privilege. When for some people repayments become difficult the crippling debt and fees serve to dig an impossibly deep hole, for others credit cards just add to the cost of living – not killing them but making life significantly harder.<br /><br />The alternatives to credit card companies are worse. So called payday loans which provide instant short term loans of amounts like $6000 without credit checks, are loan sharks with fancy marketing. People end up with real interest rates as high as 68%, face late fees for not meeting repayments and end up facing constant harassment from debt collectors. Here are some resources that make for harrowing reading:<br /><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/whats-up-with-payday-loans/7794806">http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/whats-up-with-payday-loans/7794806</a><br /><a href="https://peterpilt.org/2014/03/03/exposing-nimbledumb-little-loans-deceptive-little-company/">https://peterpilt.org/2014/03/03/exposing-nimbledumb-little-loans-deceptive-little-company/</a><br /><a href="https://peterpilt.org/2016/01/12/financial-rape-of-australians-by-wallet-wizard-cash-converters-and-loan-ranger-peter-pilts-thoughts/">https://peterpilt.org/2016/01/12/financial-rape-of-australians-by-wallet-wizard-cash-converters-and-loan-ranger-peter-pilts-thoughts/</a><br /><br />The ultimate lender of last resort is the pawn shop. Cash converters is the most famous. They are an unwitting but not unwilling fence of stolen goods half the time. Even when they pawn legitimately owned property that business model is based on undervaluing goods to those who bring them in. I remember seeing an elderly man being told how worthless his wedding ring was by some young punk in a Cash Converters Polo-shirt while I waited to check if they had any of my stolen property. That’s the ugly face of capitalism they keep out of the brochure. In addition Cash converters joins in the payday business with a lack of scruples that makes the other players in that industry look good. In &nbsp;2015 they were reached a settlement to <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-18/cash-converters-reach-settlement-partial-refund-loans/6556018">refund about 37.500 customers</a> after charging them real interest rates as high as 633%!<br /><br />If you are wondering if there is a solution you’ll be pleased to know that there sort of is. All the small dodgy lenders we’ve mentioned (like Nimble and the rest) can be considered micro-credit or micro-finance agencies. They are ways to provide small amounts of credit – anywhere between less than a 100 dollars to a few thousand. NILS, the <a href="http://nils.com.au/">No Interest Loan Scheme</a>, administered by Good shepherd, is showing how micro-financing doesn’t have to be exploitative and can serve as a crucial step in staving off deeper poverty. For want of a grand for example a person may not be able to repair their car and thus can’t make it to work.<br /><br />The NILS program is restrictive. The loans can’t be used for ongoing costs like rent or bills. This is so as not to put a loan in the hand of someone who might be able to obtain emergency rental assistance or defer their bill payment – better options really than a loan. It also ensures the loans aren’t simply bandaiding a problem that will re-present in a month. The size of the loans are also very small between $300 and $1200. That no doubt ensures the program helps the most people but there would be many people who need more than that. For example, purchasing a roadworthy car for less than $4000 is nigh impossible.<br /><br />Participants also need to be on low incomes and healthcare cards. This ensures the program meets the deepest need however even people off health care cards can face the need for credit with a real uncertainty about when or if those circumstances will turn around. <a href="https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/enablers/income-test-low-income-health-care-card">The Health care card cut off</a> is reached with an income of about $500 per week with an allowance of $34 dollars per dependant child. Two bedroom dwellings in Bendigo ( a regional Victorian town) are at their cheapest at $220 per week, while in Fawkner (a once outer suburb of Melbourne and traditionally very working class) they sit above $300 (which is still more than $100 cheaper than a basic single person apartment in Carlton). (<a href="https://www.realestateview.com.au/">https://www.realestateview.com.au</a>) It is easy to see how a family might be on an income above the Health care card cut off and still be in financial stress after rent.<br /><br />We should also consider that it doesn’t make economic sense for people to focus on mere survival. Living beyond our immediate means can be good economics. A person might reasonably build or purchase their own home, or undertake study or obtain a bee hive and a couple of chooks, or get that sore back properly looked at or buy a push bike. These are all investments in a more sustainable personal economic future which lines of no interest credit would make a lot easier. The NILS program of the Good Shepherd might service only some of these occasions. Its not meant to replace exploitative micro-credit agencies all together. For that we may need to consider other options.<br /><br />Crowdfunding can be a way forward. <a href="https://www.canstar.com.au/p2p-lending/who-offers-peer-to-peer-lending-in-australia/">Peer to peer lending</a> is specifically a type of crowd funding which aims to emulate the banking system with lower overheads. The outcome is both lower interest rates for lenders and higher returns for investors. In addition peer to peer lending can give investors more control over how their money is loaned out. One positive aspects of peer to peer lending is how it draws loans from a very broad range of investors thus reducing the impact of a single loan default on any one person. The platforms also provide anonymity to lenders and borrowers overcoming our cultural problem with money and friends. Peer to peer lending however is profit driven perhaps precisely because of that anonymity enabling us to make a profit off simply loaning money to someone. I hope peer to peer lending does bite into the major banks business but I also don’t expect it to fundamentally challenge the banking business model so much as run it more efficiently.<br /><br />The other extreme are crowdfunding sites through which people give money away like &nbsp;<a href="https://au.gofundme.com/">GoFundme</a>&nbsp;and to a lesser extent <a href="https://pozible.com/">Pozible</a>&nbsp;(which has some rewards for givers). Theses sites don’t fully escape our cultural taboos about asking friends for money. There are people who, in financial stress, still wouldn’t use such a means of asking. On the flipside because the money isn’t officially loaned people may put a higher standard on why they would give it. Perhaps a car that needs repairing wont be enough to garner support.<br /><br />I did say Pozible and GoFundme don’t officially loan money but they can still be understood as forms of credit. If I fund you when you need money and when your situation recovers you fund someone else and so on, including the possibility that I will one day be funded myself, then the gifted money acts just like a no-interest micro- credit scenario would. Money moves around to meet need and keep people away from loansharks.<br /><br />There are other ways donations can form a kind of bank. <a href="http://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/2968702/free-wheels-open-doors-for-families/">Free Wheeling Fun</a> in Bendigo takes in old bikes, fixes them up and then provides them for a donation to anyone who needs a bike, This concept of free-cycling minimizes expenses and waste at the same time. Baby gear; prams, cots, high chairs, clothes and toys , even non-disposable nappies; all are perfect for free cycling. They just take up space &nbsp;once outgrown but they will be a real boon to someone else. What makes this sort of giving away into a form of micro-credit is the reciprocation. Upon giving away a cot, get a kids bike for a donation, then give that back because your kid is grown and ask a stuff-sharing community for a cot because its second child time. Or something like that. What doesn’t make this like a bank is that giving or taking is not tracked. While this means people may exploit the situation I suspect that doesn’t happen as often as feared. Rather I worry that people would be concerned about looking like they were exploiting the system and despite the opportunities in free-cycling will only turn to it after exhausting less savory options.<br /><br />The enemy of positive, generous and non-restrictive micro-credit alternatives is a cultural view that we all must stand on our own. Nobody does stand on their own of course. We are supported by family and friends if we are fortunate. Less positively we are a part of histories of oppression and theft in Australia. For good or ill, any employment we have is embedded in a whole society that makes that employment possible. In so many ways the cliché call to stand on our own (in addition to conjuring an image unfair to people without use of their legs) is never accurate. If we can accept that, we can instead invest in fairer ways to help each other. Anything has to be better than interest rates that contribute to our growing income inequality.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-61282451805107515032017-04-05T19:20:00.001-07:002017-04-06T15:18:28.155-07:00A Theological Response to Child Abuse in the Church.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0d3GrZYIfDM/WOWkOrKO9uI/AAAAAAAABj8/tfm0g42cwk85v0LU-WKD0aFc9xFa-Fv_gCLcB/s1600/jesus-loves-his-church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Jesus loves his church." border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0d3GrZYIfDM/WOWkOrKO9uI/AAAAAAAABj8/tfm0g42cwk85v0LU-WKD0aFc9xFa-Fv_gCLcB/s320/jesus-loves-his-church.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are many articles about the institutionalized abuse of children in the Catholic church. The scale of the problem in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region> alone has been phenomenal. At least 1,880 offenders. Over 4,440 victims. And this is only the Catholic church.<br /><br /><a href="http://www-archive.biblesociety.org.au/news/whose-fault-is-child-abuse-a-catholic-theologian-responds-to-the-royal-commission">One article in particular</a> struck me as a telling example of the churches response from a mainstream (perhaps a little to the conservative side) Christian site. In it a Catholic theologian outlined a practical response, a procedural response to the issue of child abuse. I actually recommend the content of that article for what it was trying to be. The article, by a theologian, also illustrated to me the absence of a specifically theological response from the church to this issue. <br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></div><div class="MsoNormal">Theology is the discussion and study of the divine. It is the considering and contesting of all that can be said about God, or even whether anything can be said at all. The epidemic of child abuse in the church is shaping how God is understood and affecting what statements about God are believable. There is a lay theological response to this issue even if it seems like church theologians are largely focused on the pragmatic. I want to try and articulate how I see that theological response developing in this article.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />It is important to distinguish a theological response from one which looks for blame or solutions. There are many different contributing factors to blame for child abuse in the churches. These may include theological factors – that is people’s understanding of God may have enabled and even justified the abuse, but other factors include institutional self-preservation as well as explanations that are better rooted in patriarchy and a broader social devaluing of children. The purpose of a theological response is not to push theological faults forward as if they alone explain what has happened but to look for how to positively understand the divine in the mess of this matter. The end result of a theological response is a set of statements about the divine that can co-exist with the abuse that has transpired.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />The first reflection that must be made is of God’s weakness. I say that to deliberately confront a particular notion of God represented by the statement, “God will not be mocked.” This notion of God is represented by the stern disciplinarian who stands above us with strap in hand, swift punishment befalling those who disregard their authority. Whether or not the divine cares if it is mocked, it has had no recourse when it is so thoroughly debased and disgraced as to be used to cover child abuse. I am not blaming the divine. I am postulating that it has been grossly misrepresented, but I am noting it could not prevent that misrepresentation.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To an extent this is simply the classic “problem of evil” that is used to disprove a God who is all loving, all powerful and all knowing. &nbsp;Child abuse is a clear evil and a God who has all three of those characteristics is not consistent with a world in which child abuse occurs. There are answers to this problem – the importance to God of free will being one of them – but those answers don’t really do much other than insert a “because” in the statements at least in terms of the God we experience. God must allow evil to occur and thus cannot be experienced as all powerful over the world <i>because</i> of the importance to God of free will. <br /><br />The problem of child abuse in the church, however, is not simply a crisis of God’s power over the world. It is specifically a crisis of God’s power over their representation. The result of this crisis, regardless of the “becauses” that we insert, is that God cannot be experienced as in control of their representation. This means that whatever logical solution we come to that preserves Gods existence in the presence of evil, the connection between God and their representation in the world must cease to be a special relationship different to their connection to the world at large. <br /><br />This is huge for some churches. For other churches, not especially. The Quakers have a strong distrust of people speaking for God in any way and believe in our capacity to experience God directly through silence and stillness. At the other extreme the Catholic church holds that it is specially instituted to represent God on earth through the authority of the Pope and their Bishops. The idea of a God who has the power to do that simply does not survive the child abuse scandals of the church. God can grant no special protection from corruption or falsehood to any institution standing in their name.<br /><br />This is not just a problem for Catholics. Generally Christian denominations have relied on two sources of authority to support their doctrines. The traditions of the church and scripture. These two strands are not distinct. The specific texts which were included as scripture in Christianity were chosen by a series of early councils of the church which relied on tradition to determine inclusion. Tradition is also why these decisions are seen as enduring. Meanwhile the Catholic church, which could be said to have emphasized tradition over scripture, bases its authority to do so on a passage in scripture. Importantly both tradition and scripture rely on some notion that God has some capacity to bless their correct representation in the world. Christian scripture is not the writings of an incarnated God but writings about that experience by others and is deemed to be specially protected from falsehood by God.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This reliance on protected representation only becomes stronger as we head back into Christianities past and the books of their Old Testament. There are Christian schools of thought which contend that meaningful theology must be restricted to uncovering the truths revealed in either these books or the New Testament writings. This is to say that &nbsp;Biblical representations of God are all that can be trusted and evidence from beyond them is unsafe to depend on. This is how deeply held the notion of a special relationship between God and their representation by the church (in the broader sense of the word) is for some forms of Christianity. Such ways of theologizing cannot survive the child abuse scandal rocking the churches.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I should note that there is strong evidence, at least in the Catholic church, that the proportion of offenders in positions of authority exceeds that of the general community. However, this isn’t necessary to justify the claims I am making. Nor is it necessary to prove this isn’t simply because more trust over vulnerable people was historically placed in the churches hands or due to a hands-off approach to the church by secular authorities that would have failed any organisation. Regardless of cause the evidence that there is no special difference favouring those purporting to represent God over secular organisations is enough to disprove a special relationship between God and their representation in terms of power over evil.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If no special relationship exists between God and their church then this is not all negative. Freeing the divine from possession by its spokespeople (spokesmen mostly) emboldens other theological claims. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Abuse that is exposing the abuse in the churches is the work of the non-churched, the religious and the ex-churched. If the divine is free from a special connection with the church we can see the divine in this work. The work of the commission can be viewed as divinely inspired even as it exposes and potentially weakens the church.<br /><br />Much of Judaeo-Christian theology has God massively concerned with their representation. They are, in story, outraged by heresy and idolatry both of which get God wrong. If God is incapable of protecting themselves from misrepresentation this idea of what angers God seems foolish. It would be a futile anger. We might be better off considering the divine as a spirit radically unconcerned with their representation, happy to work through atheists or Catholics in order to get the job done as in the work of the Royal Commission. This picture of God seems more consistent with a world in which we are saddened and inspired by different aspects of human society with no pattern as to whether they can be associated with one religion or another or none.<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></div>There are many more diverse theological responses to this issue than I have covered here. There are victims who simply put to one side questions of God’s power and find a place for God as a companion in their suffering. There are others who dismiss entirely the usefulness of the idea of any divine spirit. These both seem like legitimate responses to me. The picture of God that is no longer viable is the God who can guarantee to be known through their representatives, by ensuring that the lies that happen outside the church are kept from happening within.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-41119980039296709582016-11-08T14:58:00.001-08:002016-11-08T17:44:26.588-08:00Marriage - Something old, Something new. <div class="MsoNormal">I’m currently reading “Love Wins”. Not the much hyped Rob Bell book about the non-existence of hell but a book by Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell with the same title, about the court battle to establish marriage equality in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S. I</st1:country-region>t’s a fascinating story so far with clear prose back grounding the plaintiffs and lawyers pivotal to the case. The differences evident in the book between the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region> situation and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region>’s has led me to undertake some historical speculation. We are currently at an impasse in the progress towards marriage law reform in this country. Could we have taken a different path?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />In 2011 Julia Gillard as Prime Minister of a minority government, opposed same-sex marriage. As parliamentary leader of the Labor party she negotiated that a conscience vote on the issue of marriage reform was Labor’s policy rather than a binding vote in support. At the time this was seen by some as protecting Labor backing amongst religious conservatives. Catholics are a significant Labor constituency with historically socially conservative views. Those views are changing however with opposition to homosexuality now largely living in more Liberal voting evangelical churches. This was one reason why the politics of Gillard’s decision led to many scratched heads. Was it really necessary? <br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></div><div class="MsoNormal">Even more confusing was that Prime Minister Gillard herself was an open atheist in a defacto relationship with no (public at least) intention of marrying. Why was she personally aligned with the “marriage defenders” on this issue? Gillard didn’t just broker a deal on the conference floor she spoke openly about not wanting to change the marriage act to include same-sex relationships. For atheists who take a strong pro-secular position the chance to remove John Howards judeo-christian inspired stipulations about gender seemed like a no-brainer. If it wasn’t politic to do so, this could be understood, but to go on the record as not wanting to change such a blatant elevation of religious concerns? As an atheist? Bizarre.<br /><br />Gillard however gave us her preferred solution. Straight couples and same-sex couples alike should embrace civil unions. Leave marriage to the churched. I imagine that Gillard might have also felt that she represented the ultimate victory in regard to marriage – a person holding the highest office in the land without needing a ring on their finger to prove their substance, a woman in public office who didn’t need to express pining for her day in white taffeta. From this perspective making marriage relevant again by broadening it to same-sex couples looks like a gross step backwards. <br /><br />I’ve been wondering, what would it have taken for Gillard to have been right? For our circumstance then to have been the Lefts cultural victory in this matter, sans any change to the Marriage Act would have needed Australians to embrace a perspective that wasn’t popular even then. &nbsp;Marriage equality has gained momentum since that time and is now the only solution for the cause of same-sex relationship recognition in the popular imagination. &nbsp;It would have taken a very different <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region>to have ended this conversation with Gillard’s solution in 2011.<br /><br />Crucially, we would have needed there to be a stark split between those who marry and people in the LGBTI communities and their allies. If those groups were separate then the rhetoric of “leave marriage to them” would make sense in the LGBTI community. “Them”, the marrying-kind, as distinct from those in same sex couples or their allies, would be a sensible category. For some people this is their reality. The adult children of people who never married, whose parents have no expectation their kids will marry can feel marriage belongs to “them”. Such people may see marriage as irrelevant to their life – not only are they unlikely to get married, but they are unlikely to even get invited to a wedding. Occasionally someone in their circle of friends or family surprisingly falls in love with one of the marrying kind and a wedding invitation appears in the mail. &nbsp;Attending the wedding is like attending a bar mitzvah when one is not Jewish. The food is great, the music as well, but nothing makes perfect sense. You just roll with it as a curious exotic adventure.<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></div><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Likewise the other side of the divide, the marrying kind, would need to be profoundly separate from members of the LGBTI community and their allies for Gillard’s position to be comprehensible for them. Again this is some defenders of traditional marriage’s reality, betrayed when they use slogans like “choose your own word, leave marriage alone.” For these people same-sex couples are not a part of the tradition and history of marriage. They are like goyim at a bar mitzvah who liking the look of the thing decide to have their own. The belief is that same-sex couples have no historical claim to this ritual.<br /><br />Although some people live lives as described above with few connections to their opposite, my own society is not like this at all. I have one sibling who is married, one engaged, one who probably never will get formally married, and my self who married only after having my children. In our extended family there are atheists, Catholics, Anglicans, Evangelicals and a bunch who are open to a range of religious positions. Friends and family include same-sex couples. Marriage is our word, our cultural heritage, although none of us are treating it exactly like our parents and some of us are either rejecting or radically reinventing it. &nbsp;It seems perfectly plain to me that same-sex couples who want to get married, and whose families and friends want to celebrate their weddings, do so because this is a part of their traditions and cultural heritage. It is what their parents did and what their siblings have done. It is their word too.<br /><br />There is something gloriously socialist about the construct of the civil union. Or perhaps a better description of its tone would be the perfect rationalism of the French republic with its proposed ten hour days and ten day weeks. By sweeping away the traditions of the past and replacing it with something that lacks such baggage we can provide a purely functional answer to state relationship recognition. Marriage can continue in churches, including gay affirming churches too, or synagogues or mosques or wherever really but as a separate institution, left on the law books as an anachronism. Or in true French revolutionary style we can even expunge marriage from the law books altogether and make it a private arrangement. <br /><br />Bluntly this isn’t how the world works. The French Republican Calendar was abolished after twelve years. Esperanto, developed in 1887, to replace European languages with a logical grammar, hasn’t caught on. Legacy systems&nbsp;pervade our culture: you might argue because of a failing of vision and ambition. However partly at least we want those legacy systems to remain as a connection to the past and our shared heritage. Far more than Gillard realized and far more than those who want same-sex couples to leave marriage alone we all have a shared heritage that includes marriage. What we are trying to do is to share it better.&nbsp;</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-38560108754605708652016-07-05T21:06:00.001-07:002016-07-06T20:51:10.572-07:00So many points of no return.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i1OTQQ_-9jM/V33RoYjeuyI/AAAAAAAABfs/M-bcSDjSNmUpl3ri_WufOJdeZ3LQiL59ACLcB/s1600/cliff%2Bedge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i1OTQQ_-9jM/V33RoYjeuyI/AAAAAAAABfs/M-bcSDjSNmUpl3ri_WufOJdeZ3LQiL59ACLcB/s320/cliff%2Bedge.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />Just before Australians cast their votes in our most indecisive election ever , the leader of the Liberal party and incumbent Prime minister gave an <a href="http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/address-to-the-national-press-club">address to the National Press Club</a>. The answers he gave to some questions touched on a theme of interest to me. It’s the theme that everything hangs in the balance or that we are at a point of no return.<br /><br />A question from Catherine McGrath from SBS television about engagement with multi-ethnic Australia prompted a response that oddly was able to include this sentiment;<br /><br /><i>“Right across our nation, the choice on Saturday is clear - my team, a stable Coalition majority Government, with a clear national economic plan that will enable Australians in all of their diversity to realise their dreams.</i><br /><i>On the other hand, the chaos, the uncertainty, the debt, the deficit, the higher taxes slowing investment, deterring employment, depriving Australians of those opportunities – that is the choice. It’s a clear one.”</i><br /><br />A question from Catalina Florez for Network Ten about the Prime Ministers security in his own leadership was deflected with this idea;<br /><i><br /></i><i>“Catalina a win for the Coalition on Saturday is critically important for the future of 24 million Australians. It’s critically important for their children and their grandchildren. It’s critically important for the generations that are yet unborn.”</i><br /><br />This could be considered standard political rhetoric. An incumbent government will always want to hype the risk of change, especially when it has only been in power for one term. Suggesting that voting for the other team will bring descending chaos is par for the course.<br /><br />It is not surprising then to find similar sentiments from the main opposition party, or from minor parties. The issue might be the health system, public television, the environment or some vaguely racist Australian way of life but the tone is the same; everything hangs in the balance, this is the point of no return. Vote for me or we're doomed!<br /><br />I am not writing this blog to scoff at this rhetoric. There are ways in which I consider the stakes high enough and the choices stark enough to make exactly such statements justified. The Great barrier reef is in very dire straits, possibly past the point of no return. The removal of protections for Aboriginal sacred sites in Western Australia will commit damage that cannot ever be undone. If we sign the TPP we will have shackled ourselves legally to support more rights for corporations than governments and cannot simply walk away. A line was crossed when we gave our immigration minister the capacity to remove people’s citizenship. We need a commissioner to investigate the abuse on Nauru before the perpetrators crawl under some rock and evidence is destroyed.<br /><br />I believe everything I’ve stated in the above paragraph so I am not trying to mock claims that we face critical junctions. In fact I often suspect we are wired to dismiss catastrophic language out of hand. I think we might very well carry a sense of our own absolute importance and believe that this protects us, individually, nationally and globally from anything too bad. I remember a story of a musician who fell out of a second story window one day and only just survived. It was the moment when they realize they were not guaranteed a starring role in life; they could just be the guy who dies in the first act. Most of us don’t have that realization. Religiously there seems to be a similar sort of denial that climate change is really real, as if God would never let it happen to us. Nationally we want to believe that a mining boom was evidence of our hard work or national destiny, not a lucky streak we have ridden while our manufacturing has dried up and blown away. I don't think we are too special to &nbsp;be doomed.<br /><br />What I do want to do is ask, “What are the implications of a genuine belief that we might pass a point of no return on a matter of deep importance?” In life we must often cope with holding a sincere high stakes view of a particular choice and the awareness that we don't control how that choice will be resolved. This might be because we accept that we share that choice with so many others in a democracy. It might be because we see the world around us as largely idiots led by liars. Either way we know we might lose in a contest of ideas even when everything hangs in the balance.<br /><br />One solution is to make personal choices and support causes that match our values, separate to the political process. During the election campaign our family came close to hosting a survivor of Nauru currently on a bridging visa who was stuck without housing in Bendigo. Bridging visa’s preclude housing services from being able to offer much assistance and a robbery had left him without means. He left Bendigo for work on the Murray instead which reflected his discomfort with taking charity (and probably not our messy house). Our name is now linked with Rural Australians for Refugees, as a potential site of accommodation. I’m not saying this to brag (we didn’t actually do anything) but because this, plus weekly tutoring we do for a family of Karen refugees, is how my family copes with having little political control over the high stakes matter of Australia’s refugee policy. Other people make the choice to foster, donate to services for the homeless, establish farmers markets, or fund-raise for solar panels on schools. Taking these actions can help us cope with fast approaching dooms we can't convince our leaders to care about.<br /><br />Sometimes we refuse to tolerate our slide towards disaster. I can think of many times when I have admired direct action to oppose injustice despite the democratic will of the majority. My hear swelled with genuine adoration of the people who&nbsp;<a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/passengers-removed-from-qantas-flight-following-asylum-seeker-protest-20150202-133o65.html">refused to allow a Quantas flight to take a refugee back to persecution in 2015</a>. There is obviously a danger of elitism to this. How do I know that I am right to stand against the will of the majority. As any student of history shows however majorities don't just get it wrong as often as individuals they get it even wronger in more spectacular fashion. My last post which mentions the Heroic Imagination Project raised the very point that obedience to social norms is evils best friend.<br /><br />What consideration should we show other people’s dread that something is a matter of extra-ordinarily high stakes and beyond their control. If we share their understanding of the issue we can lock arms around shoulders and cry together. But what if I don't agree with the weight they give the matter? I know people who felt the inability of midwives to obtain insurance for homebirths was tantamount to disaster. It just didn't rate like that for me but do I owe them any allowance for the grief and outrage that I understand in principle? And what if we are opposed to their view; do we owe them any graciousness even as we work for the very outcome they perceive as catastrophic? What graciousness could be meaningful short of a concession to their strong feeling?<br /><br />This last question bears relevance to the matter of same-sex marriage for me. I support the removal of gender from the marriage act of Australia. I have increasingly been seeing it as a matter of less importance though. This is because as more and more other nations endorse same sex marriage we are increasingly culturally accepting the institution in advance of any legal change. A same-sex couple can say they are married in Australia and the response in many public spaces is that this is a "real" marriage. This response emboldens other declarations and before you know it gay couples are as likely to want you to look at their wedding photos as straight ones.<br /><br />This current situation in which culture leads the law (rather than the opposite) actually appeals to the anarchist in me. There is something empowering about recognizing marriages in spite of the state's position although to be fair we have relied on other nations laws to get us there. Still I sometimes wish &nbsp;we who have argued for legislative change never gave such importance to government opinion in the first place. Rather than feeling that a same-sex marriage which lacks government imprimatur is not a real marriage I feel like it is more real – more purely a statement by two people, fists raised together against the world. I’m a romantic in this way.<br /><br />There are however people both supportive and opposed to same sex marriage who feel that marriage law reform is the paramount political issue of our time. There was <a href="http://yourcan.org/index.php/committee-statements/20-a-statement-by-the-gaa-church-and-nation-committee">an unfortunate statement put out by the Presbyterian church of Australia</a> in the lead up to this election. It described passing marriage law reform as to “embed motherlessness and fatherlessness in public policy.” The sole mention of any other concerns was to rank them as less than marriage law reform.:<br /><i>“The Presbyterian Church understands that the moral matrices by which each of us evaluates political parties are often wider than one issue and weighted differently. They include concerns about social justice, equity, and morality when weighing the common good. However, redefining marriage is a once in a lifetime issue, and it is our belief it should be weighed accordingly, and considered carefully.”</i><br /><br />This was a relatively calmly toned piece. We can find hotter heads on either side of this issue if we try. The point is that in this statement the Moderator General of the Presbyterian Church of Australia spoke for many who feel that same-sex marriage constitutes a watershed moment for their politic. Assuming that eventually we will get there and same-sex marriage will be passed is not ridiculous. It regularly receives above 60% support in reliable polls. Do we who support marriage reform have any obligation to sympathy to those who oppose same sex marriage and fear that it will take us to a place of catastrophe?<br /><br />The simplest answer is no. A sense of impending doom can’t be allowed to create obligations on those who don’t share that sense. Otherwise we create the incentive to manufacture such a sense of doom. Anyone who parents knows this. And if you don’t then I would like to tell you how critically I feel I need some chocolate. Very critically.<br /><br />This answer however is insensitive to the way in which friendships and family connections reach across political divides. I have people close to me who do think that same-sex marriage is a mistake of epic political importance. As, culturally, same-sex marriage recognition is already here, due to international influences, and is likely to be introduced legally to Australia soon, its worth reflecting on how I would like those friends and family members to act towards me if they were winning this debate. How would I feel about their triumphalism if the poll numbers were reversed? I probably wouldn’t want to hear it.<br /><br />One thing that can be done is to listen to specific fears and see if they can be mitigated. Some people think that the only time you should take your adult pants off with another adult person is if the two of you are married and whats under those pants is wildly different. Specifically they think there should be a penis and a vagina. Some of those people, but not all, also think you should only put those bits together to make babies and not do anything which makes babies unlikely. There are ways that these ideas are defended that breach standards of polite conversation &nbsp;- calling women who live differently sluts for example or describing gay couples as narcissistic (you know because a man loving a man is like a man loving himself). But even there do we really want to use the law to make such speech illegal? I don't and would like to nut out some agreement about the reasonable freedom to articulate a variety of views about sexual morality. This includes some appreciation that what is ok in church is not necessarily ok in the workplace and what is forbidden in the workplace needn't be forbidden in church. People shouldn't fear that marriage law reform will lead to gulags for traditionalist Christians and that means challenging any rhetoric against their views that justifies that fear.<br /><br />There are areas of potentially unsolvable conflict. I am not comfortable with descriptions of homosexuality as a disorder or mental illness or as sinful. I don't think any of those descriptions constitute hate speech but I don't think they constitute "health speech" either or "holy speech" if you like. I want to argue against these descriptions but I don't want to have those arguments in federal parliament. School policies, government tenders to service providers, the regulations of professions like social work and psychology are areas where the line between local argument and state control have always been murky. I am not sure how to resolve lines between free speech and therapeutic or justice priorities in these areas. I think we can avoid confusing these battlegrounds with marriage reform but I concede people who think homosexual activity is sinful are scared they wont be able to keep saying so and maintain public employment. I'm willing to investigate that fear and we should all interrogate our motives to see if that is actually our intent.<br /><br />There will be celebration when marriage law reform finally happens. There should be. Marriage requires an element of public celebration after all. However I will try to be mindful that there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth as well and that this feeling is no less sincere than the feeling I have about the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Although can I just say, the Great Barrier Reef is dying within two centuries of white invasion after thriving under thousands of years of responsible care by several different Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander nations.... if we could at least not trumpet the supremacy of Judeo-Christian Australia so much it'd be great!<b>&nbsp;</b>Bloody hell.<br /><br />Politics takes us past many points of no return. Life does too. We cope in different ways.&nbsp;Even if our fears of descending chaos are not founded it can be difficult to know that at the time. I think if we are to maintain the bonds of family and friendship across disagreements about matters of high stakes then we need to have some consideration of each others angsts. In terms of our own fears hopefully we have shoulders not only to cry on but that join in making our hand cart as just and fair as it can be on its descent to hell.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-60296854476002607752016-06-16T19:55:00.001-07:002016-06-16T22:35:45.484-07:00Understanding Evil.A while ago I wrote a series of posts in which I explored the Problem of Evil (or <a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/problem-of-eeeevil.html">Eeee-vil </a>if you like). This is a classic philosophical problem that atheists sometimes like to throw at theists. If God is all powerful and all good then how can there be evil?<br /><br />My take on this problem was rather different. For one thing I consider the Problem of Evil to be one that does not merely belong to theists to grapple with. The Problem of Evil challenges all views of the universe in which right and wrong have some objective basis –whether that basis is theistic opinion, or reason or mental health. If right, for any reason, is able to be objectively distinguished from wrong, then we all have to wonder why we continue to do wrong at all. There must be some other drive or creative force to explain why even a million or so years of humanity has done little to shift the perennial problem of evil. This experience that evil persists ultimately obliges us to doubt the sovereignty of reason or the normality of empathy as much as the theist must doubt the sovereignty of a loving God.<br /><br />I’d like to revisit the question of evil in this post but with a different focus. I’d like to ask the pragmatic question of how we can understand what produces evil. In doing so I will present two different views that try and understand wrongdoing. I’m going to avoid the tricky theodicy of evil mentioned above – anyone interested in that aspect can revisit those earlier posts – and focus on ways of understanding evil’s causation that throw up possible interventions.<br /><br /><b>Learning theory and developmental models.</b><br /><br />When an infant cries in the night, waking us up, we do not consider this bad or wrong. We want our child to alert us if they are distressed. Likewise it is good if they are hungry that they demand food. We are not offended if they demand food while we are preparing it – how are they to know we are preparing the food for them? We are not, after a slow breath, offended even when our child spits out the food we have prepared, calling it yucky. We do want them not to swallow what tastes bad to them. It’s a useful self-preservation skill for someone who is still tasting the dog.<br /><br />If our teenage child demands food while we are preparing it we might be frustrated and point out what they should have observed. If they spit it out, calling it yucky, then we might be righteously frustrated by their lack of tact but still we would not judge this incident in the same way as if a grown and fully able person was expected us to hurry up with dinner and then griping that it wasn’t to their taste. What is appropriate, even desireable, for a person at one age and stage is not appropriate in another situation.<br /><br />This attitude to wrongdoing is really helpful when parenting. Is your kid pushing boundaries or testing limits? So they should be. You in return should respond in a way that is loving but also acknowledges realities that your child needs to understand ie. a banging pot in their parents ear is bloody annoying or your sisters artwork is not improved in her eyes by your scribbling on it. At an early enough age a kid pulls our hair or pokes our eye, not to sadistically enjoy causing pain, but in the same way that they might ring a bell. Through our reactions we teach children whether this is a good game or not. We advise them that there is a real person like themselves in this body holding them. We also show them what this means by compassionately responding to their own pain. The specific stage at which children develop empathy is hard to pinpoint but it is usually observable before age two (and arguably not perfected in this life). It’s development is the slow result of authentic and congruent interactions with others.<br /><br />It can be difficult to apply a development model to older children’s behaviour. We may want to ascribe maliciousness to their actions when they disrespect us, they have more adult sized heads after all, but it makes sense to think of their actions developmentally. You are the unelected ruler of your child’s castle. Is it appropriate to lie to such a ruler? You might even be a little concerned about your child’s intelligence if they automatically took the rulers word that it was wrong and never had a go.<br /><br />Younger children can’t lie but it’s a skill that we actually want all children to develop – we applaud it in actors for example who can pretend to be entirely different people. We simply want them to know when to use the skill and when not to. Developing that knowledge is usually going to happen by them trying lying out and us responding genuinely ie. by trusting them less. This is how they learn about concepts like trust and reputation and the consequences of lying. As children get older they can learn more and more hypothetically. They can imagine what it would feel like to be lied to for example, but we shouldn’t be surprised if they resort to testing their theories of right and wrong. Only through relationships with others are the nuances of ethical human behaviour worked out.<br /><br />It would be wrong to characterize this idea of the development of moral character as simply being taught right from wrong. The emerging adult develops an understanding of the concepts that underpin right and wrong. This means the awareness that other people have feelings and that those feeling include such complex ones as feeling put down or put upon. Perhaps more importantly they experience being on the recieving end of genuine love. These understandings are put together so that the emerging adult can to some extent, draw their own conclusions about what is right and wrong. Specific conclusions can even be overturned from one generation to another: an honest butcher can father a proud vegan.<br /><br />A learning theory or developmental approach to moral growth understands aberrant behaviour as coming from development that is missed or gone awry. Usually the further explanation for this incorrect development is a lack of appropriate authentic and congruent relationships in a persons life. Sometimes intellectual impairment or other neuro-biological factors are seen to be in play, such as high cortisol levels, the body’s stress hormone. The corrective intervention is usually seen as taking time and involves establishing the necessary relationships that the person has missed out on. &nbsp;These relationships have to include consequences for negative behaviour but not simply as a punishment to change behaviour. Rather the consequences are ideally natural consequences. They are part of holding a genuine space for the other person to experience what they need to in order to develop a socially appropriate morality.<br /><br />There is clinical evidence to support these kinds of interventions and thus the developmental model that they draw from. We know that many people diagnosed as &nbsp;sociopaths or psychopaths will grow out of it in time. There are obviously no experimental studies to support developmental ideas of how people become inclined towards evil. It’s unconscionable to imagine controlled testing of different parenting models to see if they make one child into a villain and another into a hero. Schools are very interested in building empathy amongst students. Diverse interventions based on learning theory claim excellent results in schools but its hard to be sure of their data. When terrible acts of violence and cruelty are displayed in the media, our desire to blame improper development may have much to do with our hope that, by parenting well, we can avoid the fate of the perpetrator’s parents, who often seem bewildered by what their child has done.<br /><br /><b>Systems theory and social models.</b><br /><br />Developmental models can tell us how people become “bad people” or fail to aquire what they need to be “good people” but they struggle with the problem of how supposedly “good people from good homes” with a history of authentic caring relationships, do bad things. This is a problem that seemed to have occurred when U.S. soldiers brutally tortured and degraded the inmates of Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The U.S. Military at the time sought to blame a few bad apples for the mess. One of those bad apples enlisted, as an expert witness in their defence, psychologist Phillip Zombardo.<br /><br />Phillip Zombardo has made a lifelong study of what makes people willing to comitt atrocities and is most famous for his deeply troubling study, the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this social experiment he showed how within only a few days, through dehumanization of their victims, uniforms to establish anonymity and socialization into authoritarian roles, ordinary people could act with terrible cruelty to their peers. The experiment began with socially adjusted participants but had to be shut down in six days because it had become dangerous to participants who were roleplaying prisoners. To use <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg">Zombardo’s own language</a>, it was not bad apples that were to blame in the Stanford Prison Experiment or Abu Ghraib, but a bad barrel; a set of social conditions that enabled and normalized cruelty.<br /><br />Zombardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment is an intense case study that is supported by the repeated experimental work of Stanley Milgram. His study in 1963 found that an overwhelmingly percentage of ordinary people would apply electric shocks to a stranger even if that stranger was screaming for mercy. All that was required was that they were asked to do so by a person in a white lab coat who promised to take responsibility for the act and that their involvement was introduced incrementally. Once again there is nothing to suggest that participants who complied with potentially murderous instructions were in any way developmentally impaired. They were ordinary people.<br /><br />Looking at the barrel rather than the apple enables us to understand evil on the scale that was tolerated by Germans under Nazism, Whites under apartheid in South Africa and arguably Australians in relation to our off shore indefinite detention policies. In each of these cases near universal developmental impairments seems unlikely. Systems theory can seem at first despairing though. We can’t necessarily rely on our good character to ensure that we will not commit terrible evil. We might find ourselves slipping into it step by step until our capacity to recognize our behaviour as evil is severely diminished.<br /><br />Critics fear that systems theory diminishes any personal responsibility for our actions. It is important to note that not every person capitulates and co-operates with systematic evil and that some personalities capitulate all too easily. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmBSIQ1lkOA">Hannah Arendt</a>, a German Jew herself, explained the Nazi Holocaust with the acceptance that many compliant Nazis were not sadistic or psychopathic personalities in their individual selves, no more than Milgrams study participants or the guards of the Stanford Prison Experiment were. Her understanding was that evil on that scale is committed, not by sadists so much as by nobodies, people who have forgone their moral agency to become the ultimate obeyers. Hannah Arendt was adamant that even under the most totalitarian systems people voluntarily obey or resist. &nbsp;In her most famous quote from her book published in 1963, the Banality of Evil, she says;<br /><br /><i>[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.</i><br /><br />Phillip Zombardo is currently engaged in a project designed to cultivate and promote the people who can stand up to evil and the conditions they thrive in. These are the people who form the small portion who refused to electrocute strangers in Milgrams work, the whistleblowers who expose events like at Abu Ghraib, or the Germans who stood up to the Nazis. Contrary to what we usually hear from school programs wanting to produce positive behaviours, the <a href="http://heroicimagination.org/">Heroic Imagination Project</a> views dissent positively. It views social conformity as the greatest enabler of evil. The crucial space needed to resist evil is what Hannah Arendt refers to as the conversation we can have with ourselves. <br /><br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Uzz-fSen3TY/V2NenbCnnRI/AAAAAAAABfU/tg4vI_AfvVY1MPkY3oPepl6uqMxempOSwCLcB/s1600/Rogershelpers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Uzz-fSen3TY/V2NenbCnnRI/AAAAAAAABfU/tg4vI_AfvVY1MPkY3oPepl6uqMxempOSwCLcB/s320/Rogershelpers.jpg" width="320" /></a>What use are interventions like the Heroic Imagination Project in preventing those acts of evil which are seemingly indifferent to the rules of society, even closed societies? Although rare, violence by “lone gunmen” who act in isolation and against expectations, does exist. It seems counter intuitive to suggest that such villains need to obey less and listen to their convictions more. Two responses come to mind. Firstly that the Heroic Imagination Project is right to focus, not on the abberant perpetrator, but on the aberrant but more important heroes in these stories. These people are far better role &nbsp;models than the lone gunman and to some extent whoever we focus on will be a role model whether we call them the villain or hero.<br /><br />Secondly, it is possible that aberrant lone gunman are not so aberrant or lone as they think. Often their choices are consistent with beliefs shared by others. While no more than a tiny proportion of men kill their partner we recognize that those who do are obeying social scripts that exist about men’s pride and women as property. &nbsp;If a shooter targets dancers in a gay club as occurred recently in Orlando this is certainly consistent with a &nbsp;range of social and religious messages. Even in these cases where the perpetrator of evil is clearly disobeying certain laws and mores it may be that they are simply obeying more fiercely other laws. Even if they might view themselves as some kind of tragic hero, they may have allowed themselves to be a nobody in a system of prejudice.<br /><br />I began this post wanting to pierce the darkness around why people do evil. The Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando has been blamed on masculinity, Islam, U.S. Conservatism, internalized homophobia and easy access to weapons. Fingers have been pointed at the perpetrators family, the man himself has been called mentally ill and they have been treated as a symptom of their society. All of these are perfectly reasonable speculations. Early and contradictory reports from news sources with agendas can’t be treated as evidence of anything though. I felt a need to look away from that news cycle to get some perspective.<br /><br />I've finished this post with a little more clarity and hope. We aren’t completely blind about what produces evil. We might even be on track to knowing how to reduce incidences of evil. That might not give us an easy explanation of an individual case like the Pulse nightclub shooting. &nbsp;There are a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of untested ideas, in developmental models particularly, rushing to answer them. But as humans we aren’t entirely throwing our arms up in resignation either. We are challenging the fear that evil will always be a mysterious eruption from beneath an opaque surface. We are shining a light on where it comes from. We are planning to live in this world without the shadow of inexplicable destruction stalking our attempts to dance and have fun.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/199817063&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-22095456359842749242016-06-11T20:23:00.000-07:002016-06-11T22:33:24.220-07:00Challenging Choice Without Creating Victims.<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZxufKV8B0Qo/V1zXZCwIGoI/AAAAAAAABfA/d8oMRYwVDo0t9P7ezCbVSpJ62NQMV6y4QCLcB/s1600/choice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZxufKV8B0Qo/V1zXZCwIGoI/AAAAAAAABfA/d8oMRYwVDo0t9P7ezCbVSpJ62NQMV6y4QCLcB/s400/choice.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Many politically contentious arguments rely on the reality of choice; the idea that humans are able to weigh up and elect to follow one of a few alternative courses of action. Three relevant topics which come to my mind are debates about euthanasia, abortion and sex work in which the ability to make a choice for people who want to die, or have an abortion or engage is sex work is broadly assumed. Philosophically though, choice is a contested idea. There are diverse arguments that we don’t make our own choices because we are under delusion, driven by our unconscious, slaves to our desires or bound by historical paradigms. More mundanely we make choices within a set of possibilities we don’t get to entirely invent. If we consider freedom to be the capacity to make maximal choices, we can appreciate that having money, the invention of the airplane, and the state of conflict in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Syria</st1:country-region> all decide how free we are to choose to holiday there. These mundane restrictions on our capacity to choose are what I want to focus on in this post. <br /><br />What is motivating me to write this post is a reaction I have encountered when I question the reality of choice. The opposite of a belief in choice is often interpreted as the desire to overlook a person’s agency and to reduce them. especially amongst all creatures, to a victim of their circumstance. This is possibly a result of those arguments against choice which depend on saying a person is deluded or unconsciously driven. The reaction is righteously fierce because these arguments contain within them a core of arrogance. The person making the argument is claiming that they are enlightened enough to see the others choices as unenlightened while lacking any insight that this would be what a deluded person would think of themselves too. This fierce reaction creates a duality where in order not to cast a persons as a passive victim we must accept they are making completely free choices. &nbsp;I want to explore a way past this duality where a person can have their choice respected as coming from a person who is, in no way especially, a victim (no more deluded than the arguer) but still the complete freedom of their choice can be challenged. <br /><br />I’ll start with the innocuous issue of Sunday Trading. Bob is a hypothetical businessman who wants to open his supermarket on a Sunday in a small town with Sunday trading restrictions. Let’s imagine Bob’s costs are being covered by the other days of the week with enough profit to make the business worthwhile. A Buddhist might argue that Bob is oppressed by ignorance unless he is a Buddha and a Freudian may suspect some other driving force, but I can accept for practical purposes that Bob is making a free enough choice to open on a Sunday that we can call this his autonomous decision. But equally, Bob is not making an entirely free decision. Bob can’t also decide to fly his shop around town or to have a successful business selling only his toenails. Bob’s options are constrained by reality, and this includes economic realities.&nbsp; That much is obvious, although Bob probably wouldn’t consider it relevant when defending the freedom of his decision to open on Sunday.<br /><br />We should acknowledge that Bob’s acceptance of reality is of great immediate benefit to him. What purpose could be served if Bob allowed himself to constantly remain aware of gravity preventing him from soaring about with his supermarket? What kind of businessman would Bob be if he didn’t accept from the outset that the nature of doing business was meeting consumer demand? It seems better for Bob to simply incorporate these kinds of restrictions into his idea of freedom and enjoy or demand freedom only within their bounds. This practical acceptance of reality is entirely taken for granted by Bob.<br /><br />But although Bob has been told that the reality of business in this town is not to trade on Sundays, he reads this as the result of other people’s decisions and not an unchosen state of reality. He doesn’t accept that not trading on Sunday is a boundary within which he can have all reasonable freedom – instead Sunday trading laws are a boundary running through his reasonable freedom like an unwelcome fence through his garden rather than a natural border around it. Bob is likely to be supported in this way of looking at his world by people who either agree with Sunday trading or don’t. If Bob was to bemoan his inability to fly his shop around he might face more opinions that consider him eccentric at best and insane at worst.<br /><br />Bob’s (and our) acceptance of reality’s restriction raises concerns. There are a number of elements of Bob’s world which are just as clearly the result of people’s decisions and not an unchosen aspect of the world. Bob’s shop depends very much on people paying for the goods they want and if they don’t they must face some consequence enforced by the community. This is not some natural state – although a philosopher Locke might claim it is. Every iota of stuff in our world is bounded and owned in some way, usually with disregard for indigineous claims and certainly with disdain for the natural state of anything. Bob’s isolation of Sunday trading as if it was especially a rule running across the field of his freedom, rather than a natural limit around it, has no basis. Bob accepts other rules as just “reality” when they are just as apparently imposed. <br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--></div><div class="MsoNormal">We are not always in cultural agreement about what rules we consider realities that are beyond the scope of questions of freedom, and what we consider to be mere rules constraining freedom. Forgetting his failed toenail line for a moment, Bob might also have dreams of selling t-shirts in his shop. This too might be impractical because of an exchange rate which favors imports and a tax regime which encourages online purchasing. Should Bob accept these commercial limits as beyond the scope of what constitutes his freedom or should he perceive his freedom as extending beyond them and hampered by them? That is a political question. Are globalised free markets just base economic realities? Is freedom what happens inside these realities while these realities are not themselves restrictions of freedom?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is the political world Bob lives in but it is also the world Bob shapes. Bob knows that a smiling checkout operator brings return business. Bob decides to hire and fire on the basis of who is the biggest grinner. Is this the sort of reality that Bob’s employees must accept (they are still free to smile or quit) or can they see losing their job due to not smiling as a limit cutting across their freedom? What if Bob wanted them to wear rabbit ears at Easter? What if they were required to work nude on Naked Gardening Day? At one point we might believe the people who are working there remain free because Bob’s demands are reasonable. Once they cease to be reasonable we may consider Bob’s workers’ freedom to be at risk. <br /><br />The important thing to note here is that the person who has no problem smiling more for their job, just like Bob who has no problem opening on Sunday, is not a victim. Not especially. We do not have any justification to look down on them in any way. They are not delicate flowers that need protecting. We can accept that their decision is as much their own as any decision we would call our own. We might even want to think of them as braver, more confident and harder working than their peers. That doesn’t change if they are willing to wear rabbit ears or remove their clothing. We don’t have to think of them as poor victims of exploitation if they make these choices.<br /><br />What we do need to consider is that their willingness to make those choices affects the realities of other peoples choices. If I am a particularly unhappy fellow I will not get a job at Bob’s emporium, while it is acceptable to smile one’s way to employment. I don’t need to see this as an incentive to be weak and join all the other victims of exploitation. I can see it as a simple trade off – I get to be guaranteed a smile when I shop but I need to smile if I want to work. It’s a trade off I might be keen to accept if I like smiling. I can choose to accept as a given economic reality the need to smile at customers, within which I am free to smile or not, or choose to perceive it as a restriction that curtails my freedom to frown. In fact I must make that choice. There is no objective way to decide the issue. There is no absolute definition of what is reasonable freedom and what is demanding a ridiculous amount of choice.<br /><br />The mechanisms by which our choices affect everyone’s reasonable freedom are sometimes apparent. The most easy to see is the business council choosing to ban Sunday trading. Also fairly visible is if I accept, when applying for a job in a competitive marketplace, certain conditions, such as smiling. We can understand how this acceptance pressures other applicants to do the same. We can understand how through business competition, one business improving their sales in this way can pressure other businesses to do likewise, or even to imagine further expansions of what constitutes customer service. (Did you make the customer feel like a king today?) </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">My attitude towards sex work relies heavily on this sort of understanding. I don’t consider sex workers to be necessarily victims, or their work to be necessarily exploitative. The fact that sex work happens to be largely exploitative and workers are most often victims of trafficking around the world is possibly partially a result of its criminality. My concern is that arguments for sex work often contain extremely individualistic assumptions about the nature of choices. Engaging in sex work is seen as a choice which only impacts on the worker and their client and maybe someone the client goes on to interact with. In fact sex work legitimizes a type of service and doing this has an impact on all people who either provide services or want to or face expectations to. In other words, everybody. The fact that sex-work is a separate industry to Bob’s supermarkets is only a thin barrier. When someone is looking for a job they may well be looking at both industries, and businesses in both are competing for the same discretionary spending. <br /><br />I am frustrated when I hear the argument in defence of sex work that one cannot tell a person what they can do with their own body. For one thing, this blurs the distinction between saying that a person cannot have sex and a person cannot obtain money for sex. Such a distinction is important for a range of situations. We ban the sale of human blood for example while encouraging its donation. Even if the owner of the blood wants to sell, genuinely preferring some money to a pint of easily replaceable blood, we prevent this transaction from being possible, while making no objection to them giving it away. Likewise we prosecute people for commercial surrogacy. We don’t do this because the exchange necessarily and always involves one party being oppressed. We likewise make every worker on a worksite wear a hard hat – no choices allowed. We do this because of how it shifts the realistic expectations which frame freedom for everyone, perhaps in the hope that less oppression (or head injuries in the case of the helmets) will result. Whether talking about helmets, or blood, there is no absolute autonomy for each person over their own body</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Harder to understand is how the sorts of controversial choices of abortion or euthanasia affect what is real and acceptable for other people. I believe these choices still do. If a student has an abortion because having a baby would derail their studies, implicit in this is the idea that babies derailing one’s studies is a restriction that is beyond the scope of reasonable questions of freedom: one shouldn’t expect to be free to both study and have a child, one’s freedom exists only to make this choice. Likewise euthanasia can carry with it the presumption that certain health and lifestyle outcomes of illnesses or disabilities are not themselves to be railed against but are realities we must accept. Our only freedom is in how we respond to such outcomes. This is severely problematic for disabled activism which attempt to challenge the outcomes of disability that are determined by our societies prejudice and frankly monstrously ableist evaluation of peoples worth.<br /><br />This doesn’t establish that sex-work, abortion or euthanasia should be illegal. For one thing individuals always have to make choices inside realistic expectations. We simply ought to acknowledge that on a broader level when sex-work, abortion and euthanasia are legal we are shaping those realistic expectations. I think it is possible to be entirely pro-choice in regard to abortion out of regard for women’s bodily autonomy while recognizing that under capitalism abortion serves a purpose. It is one way that women can be expected to remain the most useful worker unit without adjustments to workplaces or men’s lives. I think we should hold on to the sense that anyone encouraging a woman to have an abortion for “common sense reasons” is shifting the conversation around legitimate freedom. I would hope it is still taboo for an employer to make that suggestion to an employee for example.&nbsp; I likewise am concerned that mainstreaming sex-work might require unemployed people to justify why they turn down a sex-worker position. I certainly wouldn’t want that to happen. It’s bad enough when the labour market expects everyone to smile. <br /><br />For me there are still plenty of good arguments for the legality of sex work, abortion or euthanasia. I am not thoroughly convinced by them but I am certainly not convinced against them. I want to acknowledge that I’m not trying to engage with these arguments here. I am simply want to challenge the reality of choice as a basis for supposedly left positions. Across a number of previous blog posts I make references to myself as a big-ass lefty. I recently told a friend, tipsy on a couple of wines, that I am only interested in the left wing take on things because the left wing take is what cares about people. Hyperbolic as I was being, there’s a truth to that for me. I don’t think I have betrayed lefty principles by being critical of the individual choice rhetoric that is used to argue for the legalization of sex-work, abortion or euthanasia. In fact I think it is imperative for lefties to be critical in this way. Yet, uncritical belief in free choice rhetoric in these areas can seem like a measure of one’s progressiveness. Perhaps here is the difference between left and progressive and if so I am more left than progressive.&nbsp;</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-71162999938661503582016-05-23T18:38:00.001-07:002016-05-23T18:41:28.015-07:00"Fair Cop": Towards a Theology of Closeness.Following on from my recent blog posts about closeness being valuable in ethics I’ve been pondering a question;<br />If I committed a crime and was convicted would I feel I would get a fairer sentence from a judge who knew me or one who didn’t?<br /><br />Have a go at answering this for yourself. Don’t rush. Roll it around in your head for a day or two and then come back here and read the rest of what I’ve written. It will still be here but if you read on now you wont have the pleasure of your own thoughts first.<br /><br />Seriously. See you tomorrow.<br /><br /><br />___________________________________________________________<br /><br /><br />Welcome back. I hope you genuinely enjoyed the question. I want to interrogate my own thoughts with you in the hope they are similar to your own but I’d also love to hear any unique thoughts you have in the comments. Firstly I wonder if your early thoughts were about the notion of bias. Is fairness a similar thing as unbiased? You may have asked this question with the assumption that, if lacking bias is what you mean by fairness in this situation, certainly the judge shouldn’t know you. To know you is to be biased towards or against you.<br /><br />But is this always true? Aren’t there many people who are biased against Muslims for example precisely because they don’t know any? If you, as a Muslim, stood before a random Anglo-Australian on the street as your judge, you might suspect they would be less biased against you if they knew you as a person rather than simply knowing facts about you, like your religion. So maybe the relationship between being unknown to your judge and a lack of bias doesn’t exist anyway.<br /><br />That would mean that a judge who doesn’t know you only really brings an impression of being unbiased. This seems an inadequate description of fairness. Given time I imagine the word fairness would give you more and more trouble. It can be a fuller, richer word than we first concede. Is it fair that Joe Bloggs goes to prison? Can we answer that only knowing what Joe’s crime was and what the sentence for such a crime usually is? Do we need to know Joes whole story from birth? Or is it something in between these extremes; A mile long walk in Joes shoes, whatever that means?<br /><br />You may have felt a need to confess; maybe those who know me actually know me the least for it, maybe I fool the most the ones who know me the best. This is where we need to define knowledge. I’m not referring to a judge who plays golf with you, a judge who has been to your house or a judge who you used to do grafitti runs with – the kind of social knowledge that creates reciprocal obligations even between people who couldn’t provide a paragraph towards a eulogy for each other. I’m talking about accurate knowledge of your strengths, limits, foils and capabilities. I’m talking about the ability to not be fooled by you – to know when you really need some slack cut for you and when you are just slacking off. &nbsp;This idea of knowledge also requires the knower to be miraculously immune to bias. If they distort what they know about you so that the picture they make from it is untrue this wouldn’t be perfect knowledge.<br /><br />With this idea of knowledge in mind I believe that perfect knowledge is essential for perfect fairness. I would go further to say the more our judges knowledge of us approaches perfection the more fairness we can expect. This knowledge might not agree with our own self-perception. I can imagine someone else knowing me hypothetically at least better than myself. Certainly at times I can be very self-deluded, sometimes stuck in hopelessness and sometimes thrilled with confidence and an external mind can see that my situation hasn’t changed with my mood.<br /><br />Perhaps like me you thought that maybe you don’t want the judge to know you even if fairness is the result. We might all rather be sent to jail by a stranger rather than lose a friendship over it. Maybe we don’t even want perfect fairness anyway. Fairness is kind of a terrible thing. If the judge doesn’t know you then you can say that the judge made the fairest decision they could but they didn’t know the whole truth. Nobody wants to be treated deliberately unfairly, that offends us, but accidental unfairness is not that. Perfect fairness robs you of the ability to grizzle at the sentence you receive in the end. Perfect fairness robs us of our self-delusions.<br /><br />How beautiful does that sound though? To be robbed entirely of our self-delusions. The terror of it is overshadowed by a sense of relief. Pretense and self-doubt, born of being unknown, is a burden. If the price of this moment of being both perfectly known and given our sentence is the consequences of perfect fairness then I don’t see how we can refuse to pay. Imagine a community of people who willingly rejected this exchange. How empty would be anything they have to say about themselves and how qualified would their freedom be given its reliance on turning away from an opportunity to receive perfect fairness? By comparison there is something actually holy about the words “fair cop” uttered by the person receiving a truly fair but harsh sentence and how genuinely freeing would a pardon be if it was based on perfect knowledge.<br /><br />This idea of perfect fairness from perfect knowledge was always a profound attractiveness of the Christianity of my youth. God who knows us completely will one day be our judge. Somewhere someone even told me of a picture of heaven in which everyone's sins were shouted from the roof tops. I can’t imagine this without cringing. I will never probably be brave enough to make this happen in my life, a mumble from my rooftop is more likely. This is despite my suspicion that you and I probably are the same long distance from perfection regardless of our fronts. But this is what Christianity offered – the chance to realize this suspicion one day and not only experience the perfect knowledge of God but to share in a community of people perfectly knowing each other.<br /><br />To bring together this ethical value of closeness with Christian theology is to produce some interesting conclusions. A God who knows us is a better judge than a distant one. A God who judges from afar, first reading our name with incorrect pronunciation from a book on our judgment day, is pretty much ignorable. They might be biased against us or fooled by our suit on the day. But a God who travels with us and shares in all of our life, knowing our story from birth, offers us something precious in their judgement, something we never know if we can even give ourselves. Whether this seems feasible to us, it is pretty cool. It puts a different spin on the purpose of the incarnation even. It suggests that God must know what is to be a woman, a poor person, a rich person, a grieving parent, a spoilt child, an alcoholic, a sinner like the rest of us. It promises everyone that they will one day be able to say with all their heart, "fair cop."<br /><br /><br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7Gx1Pv02w3Q/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7Gx1Pv02w3Q?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-48857207517523571032016-05-18T18:34:00.001-07:002016-05-18T18:48:21.609-07:00Now or Later: Distance as an Ethical concept.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Yo4WF3cSd9Q/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yo4WF3cSd9Q?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />In my last blog post I tried to defend the legitimacy of saying that a behaviour “is mean”. I was arguing that saying something is mean (or unkind) is more than just the equivalent of blowing a fart on your hand and kissing it at someone. Saying that something is mean is saying something. In particular I argued that saying something &nbsp;is mean is as legitimate if not more so than saying we shouldn’t do that thing for X or Y reasons.<br /><br />In making this claim I assumed a range of the thoughts that have been a part of previous posts I’ve written. To make them explicitly:<br />1. Morality as a purely logical system of premises doesn’t work. There simply is no logical argument against “I don’t care” &nbsp;which can be leveled against any primary premise. Concern is the root of all Morality and its a “leap of concern” as to why we should possess it.<br />2. Empathy is the particular type of concern I consider most relevant to any conversation about morality between people. Empathy-led ethics is my term for ethics which is specific and messy and values proximity to the subject. It doesn’t preclude looking at consequences or holding to ideals but it identifies these things up close with others. It doesn’t believe in working out consequences and ideals away from others.<br />3. Proximity and Distance. These are very important concepts in Empathy led ethics. Distance can be distance from the person and the situation but it can also represent the distance between a metaphor we are using and the actual act we mean it to refer to. An example of this is “you wouldn’t steal an old ladies purse” as an argument against illegally downloading a movie. The distance between the two acts tells us this is not an empathy led ethical argument. General ethical principles and rules allow us to maintain distance and the more general the rules, (a rule against all stealing rather than all downloading or even all illegality rather than all stealing) the more distance is enabled.<br />4. Distance can also be in regard to time and this type of distance was the key concern that motivated me to write the last post. The more consequential our moral reasoning the more distance we have from what is happening now and potentially the less empathy. We can justify behaviour we can barely look at because our gaze is on a distant future which makes it all right. This needs to be resisted.<br /><br />This last point might be the most contentious. After all a person who doesn’t consider any future implications of their actions wouldn’t be able to make a coffee because what on earth would getting the cup out be for (and wouldn’t that be a tragedy my morning brain thinks). Even without going to such a logical extreme what drives anxiety sufferers to panic is living too “in the moment”. This is why the phrase “this will pass” can be a powerful cognitive tool to cope with stress. &nbsp;We tend to place on a hierarchy from wise to foolish those who can think about the future to those who cant. Certainly the Ant, although a little dull, is considered more adapted to life than the Grasshopper.<br /><br />But this type of morality has failed us over and over again in a way that I find particularly disturbing. We are all embroiled in perpetuating injustices which cannot be broken because of “what if” scenarios. The homeless are homeless because “what if” we just built homes for them. Countless millions are spent on submarines because “what if” we didn’t. Debts can’t be forgiven or, in the case of what Australia owes its first inhabitants, can’t be recognized, because “what if” we did. We are so constantly frightened of loosing anarchy upon the world that we are bound into obeying structures that we hate. In post after post I have tried to indentify this entrapment and seek its philosophical remedy.<br /><br />My greatest loathing is reserved for when we make terrible compromises in the vain hope of future bliss. I make this statement despite knowing of studies that have shown that the capacity to delay gratification is a marker for both material success and happiness. The marshmallow test (see the above clip) is well worth a look, if only because kids yielding to sweet temptation are just too darn cute. Such cuteness is tempered however by the <a href="http://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification">ominous predictions</a>&nbsp;for those who can’t wait for pleasure: addiction, crime, divorce and early death. Better to work now and play later. Eat your veggies before your desert. Be the kid who saves.<br /><br />I feel these mottos make their point by looking at the problem at too small a scale. When we pan back we see that delayed gratification is also internalized oppression. To accept justice delayed is to accept justice denied. The terrible promise of scientific and economic progress is a world of harmony and equality. What makes the promise terrible is that just one more period of unemployment, one more cut to health or education, just one more wall built around our diminishing prosperity, one more power to the surveillance state or one more war, is required to get us there. And then one more again. And then one more. Obviously one day we will have a world in which refugees wont live in cages but only if we build the current electric fences higher. Young people must be willing to work for free if we are ever going to solve their poverty. It’s insane.<br /><br />Certainly it is possible to phrase many of our problems as not being future minded enough. We divide the planet now as if we won’t need to live on it in a decade. Even our detention of refugees doesn’t think ahead to what might happen if we became refugees. I could take this tack and trump those who claim to speak for the future with a bigger picture of the future than them. This is an interesting aspect of moral speech. We can find different routes to the same destination. If I sometimes take these different routes though, I find them unsatisfying, like a cyclist on the bus due to a flat tyre. I prefer to struggle to express all ethical considerations as a part of the immediate – that the possibility of us being future refugees can be experienced instead as the moral sense that we are the refugees now through a shared humanity.<br /><br />Part of my reason for not wanting to rely on the future in ethical arguments is that hypothetically at least the future might not happen. If we imagine ourselves at the very end of the universe I think we should still be able to say putting a cigarette out on a childs arm is wrong. The wrongness doesn’t depend on the child being traumatized as an adult or any other future consequence. It certainly doesn’t depend on the idea that we might one day be vulnerable and defenceless as we age. If all those possibilities were certainly not going to happen this shouldn’t change the moral weight of our action.<br /><br />Perhaps if I was a better philosopher I could distinguish between the sorts of consequences I think should inform our present moral choices and those I want to avoid. I think planting a tree next to your house needs to take into account whether the shade is in the right place and whether the roots will damage your pipes. That’s thinking of the future. But there is something deeply inauthentic to me about many applications of future thinking to our human ethics. Take the safe schools program. I can deal with arguments about whether the program will diminish or even increase bullying. I just can’t deal with the idea that we need to be concerned that bullying leads to anxiety and stress in adults. I’m sure it does but even if it didn’t bullying would be wrong. Otherwise where do we end things? Do we need to indicate some consequence of anxiety in adults before we care about that too or can we stop there? And would it be okay to bully if bullying actually “built character” in some positive way?<br /><br />Still these logical challenges are besides my main point. Why I fear distance and praise proximity in ethics is pragmatic. Ethics in history has been a lurching from one authority to another. From heart to head we toss with the violent excesses of one Romantic revolution replaced by the death worship of Economic Rationalism. Neither guides us true. Fundamentalists rush in here and say they have the answer beyond our heart or head but history has emptied their claim of difference. They also have blood on their boots. Everywhere that peace has broken out it seems to me that getting to know ones enemy has been crucial. We may hurt each other when we know each other but I think it is harder to do so and much easier to live rightly by each other.<br /><br />How does this value of proximity relate to whether its defensible to say that something is mean? Poorly perhaps. The example of spanking used in the last post was an example given to my eight year old to explain a conversation I was having with my partner about same-sex marriage. Is it meaningful to say that denying marriage to same-sex couples is mean? Should we accept that such language is unfair to opponents of same-sex marriage? I think we should resist any direction that consequential reasons, and general principles are the only types of legitimate moral speech. I think we need to try and stay within the immediate situation and consider what would happen if the opponents of gay marriage and a gay couple who wanted to get married knew each other. I suspect nobody would stop the marriage because it would too obviously be mean.<br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-44990049156732994222016-05-12T01:46:00.002-07:002016-05-16T20:13:08.963-07:00"I think spanking is mean."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MG_tkToNR7I/VzRCo7-ED9I/AAAAAAAABec/5N1bAOV6cHY8T-D5WRtaX-4R0XJAH9n2gCLcB/s1600/spanking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MG_tkToNR7I/VzRCo7-ED9I/AAAAAAAABec/5N1bAOV6cHY8T-D5WRtaX-4R0XJAH9n2gCLcB/s400/spanking.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Long term readers of this blog will know I have a co-philosopher. For her privacy I refer to her simply as the kid. She’s eight now and despite her claiming to be a tween I maintain she is a kid still.<br /><br />Recently I asked her, “What if I knew someone who loved their kids and who felt the best thing for those kids was to spank them, would it be ok for me to say to them “I think spanking is mean.”<br /><br />I added that I did feel that spanking was mean so my statement would be an honest reflection of my feelings. After some thought the kid told me “It would be better to say, “I don’t think you should spank kids because…” and then give some reasons, because calling them mean will just make people feel guilty and bad.”<br /><br />I asked, “Don’t I want them to feel guilty and bad? I want them to feel guilty about spanking so they won’t do it.” <br /><br />The kid replied, “If they feel guilty they’ll probably still do it and they might even do it more because they’re angry.”<br /><br />This is an eight year old so I am not suggesting we take her word as that of an expert. She has only just starting watching Dr. Who, and doesn’t even have any idea about Star Trek, so we can reasonably suspect her philosophy is shallow at best. However does she have a point? Or rather does she have two points:<br />1) Telling someone a behaviour is mean is not effective at changing their behaviour.<br />2) We can and should find arguments against behaviours other than just saying that they are mean.<br /><br />This second point needs to be interrogated because, the kid failed to tell me how to finish her alternative to “spanking is mean”. This is no accident. Providing reasons for moral positions is not simple. Some people even argue it can’t be done: that moral language is essential a statement of preference. This can leave us able to make appeals to empathy, i.e. “You wouldn’t like to be spanked would you?”, but leaves us with little by way of logical premises to build an objective case. Pragmatically this dilemma makes too much of the possibility we won’t share some basic assumptions that we can argue from with other people. I do however concede that strictly logical ethical arguments don’t really go anywhere and I do believe that empathy is more crucial than logic to ethics.<br /><br />My other concern with finding reasons not to spank is that we often mistakenly limit ourselves to certain type of reasons. These reasons are consequences, essentially a justification of one part of our life in terms of another. For example; It is good to exercise because it makes a person fitter. It is good to be fitter because you can be a better lover. It is good to be a better lover because sex is important to maintaining a relationship. It is good to maintain a relationship because this provides a stable place to raise children (or at least garden). &nbsp;The reason for each choice is not contained in the choice but in some far off set of circumstances – nothing is ever done for its own reasons.<br /><br />Is there any point in this chain of consequences when you felt a bit echh? Did you wonder whether having sex “for the kid’s sake” was the sort of justification that just might have you running from the bedroom? Or does it creep you out a little that the enjoyment of jogging is treated as secondary to the benefits of jogging to one’s relationship? I think there is a disassociation involved in constantly having these sorts of justifications in our head that constitutes a betrayal of the act we are committing. Does it make sense that we can betray or be disloyal to an act? An actor on the stage knows this is so. There is something tepid and dull about a performance that isn’t committed to. A life lived according to justifications that are never in the moment seems to me to have the same distracted quality.<br /><br />In contrast to this saying that spanking is mean is riveted on the moment. I’m not saying “Don’t spank your kids because if you do they will hit other kids.” In fact even if spanked kids don’t increasingly hit other kids I’m saying don’t spank them. After all if your own kid’s pain is irrelevant why all of a sudden does some other kid’s pain matter? That other kid is not even real – merely hypothetical. The encounter with them may never even occur. So how on earth does whether they get hit have more value than the interests of the kid who is actually being spanked when the decision is actually being made?<br /><br />There are two problems that stand out for me &nbsp;however with the statement “spanking is mean”. &nbsp;Firstly its unclear what I am referring to. Do I just mean the feeling of being a bad person? If so then being concerned with the meanness of any act is arguably quite selfish. This is possibly people’s biggest counter argument against calling behaviour mean or for that matter cruel. It can sound like someone is simply wanting to live in a fantasy where they are always liked and never have to say no to anyone. This doesn’t treat other people with any genuine concern, hence the saying “you need to be cruel to be kind”. Even that can be an overstatement of the contradiction. Sometimes my children’s “naughty” behaviour is a transparent ask for some limits where I can say “it felt cruel to put her to bed so early but I could tell she desperately wanted me to.”<br /><br />If this feeling of being a bad person isn’t what I mean by “being mean” what am I talking about? It’s not easy to articulate without referring to consequences beyond the immediate situation which I want to avoid. I think there is something to “being mean” about failing to identify with the other person’s personhood. Not “being mean” means rejecting the notion that the other persons fear and pain are simply levers you can manipulate: the other person has a genuine mind which has to be engaged with. In particular, meanness is unconcerned with the other minds’ enjoyment of life in a good and healthy way. Meanness dismisses this as unimportant. Calling someone mean is calling them to respect this enjoyment – to share in it even.<br /><br />The other problem with saying “spanking is mean”, and this impacts on its effectiveness, is that it just doesn’t correspond to the spanker’s reality. Here the spanker may be confusing meanness with cruelty. Cruelty relishes in the pain of its victims. Meanness not so much. However still the spanker may be behaving out of a sense of gruesome duty that goes beyond just avoiding being cruel. They may not be indifferent to the recipient’s pain and fear. They may deeply dislike causing this pain and fear. In that context even meanness seems a profoundly unfair sentence to pronounce.<br /><br />If this is the situation then it might be properly characterized as everyone accepting that the behaviour is mean, even if using that language would not be good politics. At least everyone would agree that without any extenuating circumstances the spanking would be mean. This is when an argument might take place that seeks to disprove &nbsp;those consequential reasons that justify the meanness. However this is not the same thing as producing consequential reasons not to spank. There doesn’t need to be any benefit to not spanking. The reason not to spank remains located in the moment: It remains that spanking is mean.<br /><br />This is, according to my logic, describes where arguments over vaccination also belong. Although I am pro-vaccination and anti-spanking, vaccination would surely be as mean as spanking without any extenuating circumstances. It is just that to my mind the extenuating cicumstances make it alright. Does it make sense then to say that when I vaccinate my kids I am being mean, just with good reason? I’m not sure if I want to say it does. I have to admit that an anti-vaxxer who tells me I am being mean by vaccinating my kids has not led with a convincing argument. As my kid correctly guessed it is probably just going to make me angry.<br /><br />Not politically then, but philosophically, I am disputing my eight year old’s claim that we shouldn’t say spanking is mean. This is despite being immensely proud of her for an attitude which is at odds with our culture. There is a lot of calling people mean on social media today and it sets the tone for other conversations too. Labeling other people as mean also seems to provide the license to not only be mean to those people but to be outright cruel. In this regard we need to really hold on to the difference between saying that an action is being mean and saying that a person is a mean person. Some are, but not all who spank are, certainly. <br /><br />On the other hand maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all I’m doing is arguing for some sort of anti-rational romanticism, a rejection of the common sense that life shouldn’t be lived only for a moment at a time. I do think there is a time for irrational romanticism to be sure. The gut knows what the head can become confused over. As we’ve seen with Australia’s horrific detention camps supposedly saving people from dying at sea, consequential reasoning can justify anything. But equally following one’s gut leads to its own excesses. Heads often roll. So don’t let me have the last word, let’s have a conversation instead. Tell us your thoughts in the comments.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-81289552110836359862016-04-28T04:49:00.001-07:002016-04-29T15:36:35.502-07:00Partial solutions to the need to pee. In my last blog post I wrote possibly the most positive press that postmodernism has received in the last decade. (That post backgrounds this one so I recommend you <a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2016/04/postmodernism-tale-with-two-chapters.html">read it first.</a>) Postmodernism peaked in the 90’s and early 2000's as a general search term but as the following graph shows it has encountered a steady fall in popularity since then.<br /><br /><script src="//www.google.com.au/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&amp;q=postmodernism&amp;tz=Etc/GMT-10&amp;content=1&amp;cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&amp;export=5&amp;w=500&amp;h=330" type="text/javascript"></script> <br />I feel, despite its decline, that postmodern ideas can help out with some contemporary problems. In fact some contemporary problems remind me very much of a situation at university in my twenties when I felt postmodern ideas contained a way to approach an irresolvable conflict.<br /><br />The problem back then regarded women-only spaces. This was usually a small lounge on a university campus which was reserved for women students. The rest of the university was only nominally a shared space. Men generally took up most of the public space as per our socialization. There were mostly men on the pool tables for example. It seemed to me that amongst the jocks, men dominated groups with casual ease, but I more often hung out with the card playing geeks, where guys hastily claimed every flat surface available to play on with their friends. I was then, and am now, a supporter of women only spaces on campuses, even though I am aware that women can be horrible to other women and that a tucked away lounge is not a substitute for equally shared space. A women’s lounge isn’t a perfect solution but it can provide an alternative organizing space for women to confront sexism.<br /><br />Whether or not transgender women could access women’s only spaces like women’s lounges was and is a confronting issue. Some transgender activists &nbsp;back then insisted they be welcomed in to women’s lounges while others pointedly didn’t. To those who opposed transgender inclusion, transgenderism was the colonization of the territory of women by men, with the women’s lounge a totemic example of that territory. There was a real hostility between feminists who supported transgender women’s inclusion in women’s only space and those who didn’t, partly because this was an issue that reflected other divisions - about how to understand sex-work for example. Some women’s departments seemed torn down the middle.<br /><br />My stance on the issue was simple: This was none of my business. Even involved as I was in Queer politics, even spending some of my time in a dress as I went from class to protest, to café and to pub I didn’t think the inclusion or exclusion of transgender women from the women’s lounge was for me to decide. I knew that I experienced significant male privilege – dress or no dress. In fact cross-dressing to pass at times (where a person basically fools the average joe they are the other gender) taught me there is a lot of misogyny in this world that many men just don’t know about. Dressed as a woman I had a ton of people grab my ass <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/fullysic/2010/05/06/ass-vs-arse/">(arse?) </a>and not in a good way. Friends did it, self declared feminists even did it. As a joke, it wasn’t particularly funny the first time and definitely not by the thirtieth. Nobody grabbed my ass when I was dressed as a bloke.<br /><br />My own public experiences of wearing women’s clothes were mostly around the ages of eighteen to twenty. I was not always thrilled to be perceived as male and resented &nbsp;the expectation I felt to embrace violence and insensitivity as a bloke. I felt able to escape those expectations by using clothes and mannerisms to appear female. I never identified as female or wanted to be female but then I don’t hugely identify as male or want to be male either. I did however want to be seen as female occasionally just as I imagine most people do. When women want to be seen as female it’s unremarkable however.<br /><br />All presentations to the world feel like “drag” to me. I put on a suit for court, I dress in a nice shirt and tie for a job interview, I wear a t-shirt and shorts to work with young people in relation to substance use. None of these outfits are the real me. That would be ridiculous. It would mean that I couldn’t exist in some other time such as before the t-shirt's invention. Likewise gender can’t be the real me. Gender, expressed by long hair or short hair or any item of clothing or makeup can’t derive from an essentialist idea of self. These are patterns and they don’t have any more permanence than a style of music. We can feel like the real us is expressed by rap music for example but the us we mean by this is something separate from the expression, and might need other expressions too.<br /><br />We must be very careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that gender is only self-expression however. We are not alone in society. Everybody else is expressing their views and values too. This is why there is a women’s movement and women’s lounge to begin with; not so much to express one’s own gender but to deal with the impact of other people’s understanding of gender on certain people’s lives. This impact is both externalized in people’s actions and internalized in our thoughts and feelings, so that our “own gender” is mixed up with everyone else’s. As trans-feminist Kate Bornstein describes: “women inhabit women only spaces to heal from the oppression of their number by the larger culture.” (<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=_VsCl7Ek4N8C&amp;pg=PT92&amp;dq=Kate+Bornstein+women+only+spaces&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwji9oWam7HMAhUW8GMKHeovABcQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;q=Kate%20Bornstein%20women%20only%20spaces&amp;f=false">Gender Outlaw, p82</a>)<br /><br />Each of our individual expressions of gender draw from and contribute to a wider culture (and sub-cultures) around gender. To begin with I have a limited extent to how I can talk about gender based on my imagination, and a part of what limits my imagination are the terms and reference points my culture gives me to begin with. On top of that my self-expression only makes sense to others if I limit myself to terms and reference points they understand. Finally there are real sanctions for deviating from norms around gender and rewards for living up to them. Gender may not be a real part of who I am but it is something I really do have to learn to navigate in the world.<br /><br />Acknowledging these two sides to Gender is something modernism struggles with. Modernism sees language as essentially a practice of truth-telling: if I say I am a woman this must correspond to the reality that I am a woman. It’s a position that seems obvious. Modernists can critically examine what is meant by reality and recognize there are different kinds of real – all forms of feminism do this to an extent and so does Marxism and many other modernist movements. However Modernism seems to repeatedly fall into the error of talking only in terms of one level of reality and supposing that language should be as direct as possible a description of that reality and nothing else.<br /><br />Postmodernism always questions what is meant by reality and recognizes that there are different kinds of real. This is inevitable given that postmodern views of language emphasis its many purposes other than truth-telling. Consider how often in our current election campaign we will hear some truth claims about global warming, unemployment, tax-evasion and union corruption from different parties. Even if none of these claims included any lies each party tells the truth they want to tell and glosses over other truths. The purpose of a given selection of truths is not to tell the whole truth but to scare, provoke, please and otherwise motivate voters in a particular direction.<br /><br />Likewise whenever gender is spoken of there are more purposes than simply truth-telling going on. This cuts both ways. Feminists who want to exclude transgender women from the women’s room can’t rest their case by saying “they are not real women” and equally transgender women cannot claim a right to access women’s rooms because “we are real women” as if that was either clear or a key point. These statements talk about a construct – “real woman” – as if anyone could know scientifically or intuitively exactly what it is and as if that was the organizing principle upon which a women’s lounge was based anyway, a club for “real women”.<br /><br />One way of differentiating postmodern from modern solutions to this matter is to consider time as a dimension of the problem. Modernist solutions are based on the idea that through truth-telling a solution will reflect a timeless reality. Therefore modernist solutions will be permanent and universal. This is why disagreements can become so high stakes. They are effectively winner-takes-all. Postmodern solutions are not intended to reflect reality but to engage with the circumstances which create the kind of reality that gender is. Therefore postmodern solutions are strategic solutions. Rather than cementing any solution in a constitution that would be difficult to reverse, a postmodern solution would be more willing to come up with policies with a built in sunset clause in recognition that the reality of gender will (hopefully if feminists have anything to do about it) change. A women’s room on one campus might also make a decision different to another women’s room elsewhere because they see their circumstances are different. Different histories and the alliances they have created would be relevant to local communities.<br /><br />I call these kinds of solutions partial solutions. They are temporal – limited by time, and local – limited by space, and tactical – justified by temporal and local circumstances. A women’s department is itself such a partial solution to the changing problems women face around gender. The establishment of any women’s lounge never reflected a real and timeless right to a small room with couches and an urn regardless of circumstances. This isn’t to say they must be opened up to transgender women. To be transgender is itself to take up a partial solution to gendered culture rather than tell “the truth”. &nbsp;Does this mean that the transgendered woman doesn’t possess a real and timeless right to the implications of their gender identity? I think it does because everything gender embodies is circumstantial rather than eternal. I also think this applies to cis-gender women too and anyone's gender identity.<br /><br />The obvious correlation to the issue of transgender women in women’s only spaces is <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kicker/these-are-the-transgender_b_9752266.html">“the bathroom wars”</a> currently raging senselessly across the U.S. Once again we would do well to recognize that the division of toilets into men’s and women’s is not intended to reflect a position on ultimate reality. In our own houses we don’t divide toilets that way because it would be impractical. At most gay venues there is a degree of freedom about women using men’s toilets which tends to share the toilet queues more equitably. Nobody is urinating on a scared binary when they use a toilet of any gender or no gender. Whatever policy is reached in any situation only a deliberately partial solution, local to circumstances, and sensitive to immediate needs makes sense. That’s what toilets are to the need to pee. <br /><br />This is why the North Carolina law that bans any use of a toilet assigned for the gender not on your birth certificate is so silly. It makes a state issue out of what should have been resolved at the most immediate level and encourages everyone to take a winner-takes-all position for or against the law. We have the idiocy of people who look male being forced to use women’s bathrooms because of what’s on their birth certificate in order that women concerned about men in their toilets feel safe. We have the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVuHAS2CtUM">draconian need for women to present ID proving their birth sex</a>&nbsp;to male police officers entering women's bathrooms. On the other hand making one rule for all to allow anyone to use whatever toilet matches the gender they identify with has its own problems. It can lead us with no capacity to deal with creeps like <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/02/politics/mike-huckabee-transgender-caitlyn-jenner/">Mike Huckabee wanting to perv on high school girls</a>&nbsp; or put us on a fool’s errand to find the technical point at which transition from one gender to another is sufficient. Encouraging flexibility and sensitivity say at an individual school level would be much wiser. Not blowing up the issue on social media for the sake of outrage is probably too much to hope for.<br /><br />This has been another puff piece for postmodernism in a way. If we are to avoid modernist solutions to problems we also need to properly understand why they are attractive to us. That means I need to talk about what they do well, particularly how we can use the language of rights to anchor socially just outcomes to timeless reality. That timeless reality might be a fiction but it's been fantastically beneficial to believe in it. Given the ridiculous length of this post however I’ll leave this to be explored in the comments or a future post. &nbsp;I really would enjoy hearing your thoughts.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-82177692009001893822016-04-20T20:45:00.002-07:002016-04-20T21:09:17.503-07:00Postmodernism: A tale with two chapters - and a third chapter with a problem. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-i7RNa96yUNk/VxhO5jZTGnI/AAAAAAAABd8/wJ1QTvUPM5QulUcZSk0mHQpDBDi_cU_pwCLcB/s1600/obscenegesturealert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-i7RNa96yUNk/VxhO5jZTGnI/AAAAAAAABd8/wJ1QTvUPM5QulUcZSk0mHQpDBDi_cU_pwCLcB/s400/obscenegesturealert.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br />Imagine that human history can be broken into three chapters. These chapters are distinguished by three different attitudes to authority, knowledge and progress. These attitudes, which we will call Pre-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern, are dominant in their respective eras but certainly not exclusive. There is a bit of the Premodern attitude in the Modern era and even a bit of the Modern attitude in the Pre-Modern era but between eras there is a shift in ascendancy. This makes it impossible to date these eras neatly. Even within people there is voices from all eras lingering. However someone like Moses or Mother Theresa is firmly Premodern, someone like Mary Wollstonecraft or Karl Marx is firmly Modern and someone like Derrida or Batman is Postmodern. That’s not a joke. Whereas Moses and Marx are proposing plans to fix their societies, Batman, from his position as a criminal, can only achieve partial remedies to Gotham. We will see that this is a hallmark of the Postmodern.<br /><br />We can’t really say that either Pre-Modern, Modern or Post-Modern worldviews are entirely good or bad. Hitler is modern but so is Martin Luther King. You could say Pre-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern worldviews are suited to their times however they are so pervasive that it might be fairer to say the times become suited to their attitudes. They are broader than what we usually call “philosophies”. Instead they equip us philosophically. I want to get to the point where I can discuss a specifically Post-modern equipped response to some contemporary social problems. Before we can do that I need to try and broadly describe these three world-views.<br /><br />In the Premodern world-view authority comes from above and beyond ourself. Humanity learns and knows through encountering revelation. Revelation is exactly what it sounds like, something or someone is revealing the truth to us, peeling back the curtain from ultimate reality. A key intellectual virtue of the Premodern era is patience. Faithfulness is also important as the payoff for any revelation is not always immediate. It might even be generations from the time of revelation to when it is proven true. In the Pre-Modern world view there is also no guarantee of positive progress. Sometimes there is even a view of the present as less than the past because we are now further from a moment of revelation or creation in which truth was truly known. More often time just isn’t evaluated as a simple straight line based on human social happiness; prophets arise in our darkest hours while prosperity brings its own corruption and all seasons have their purpose.<br /><br />In the Modern world view authority is a term with a changed meaning. We are not waiting for a message from an author of the world. We are able to speak with authority ourselves. The basis of our authority is adherence to a process – rational thinking, logic, the scientific method, evidence based practice, reflective practice, client-focused systems, democratic processes and so on. All of these from pre-enlightenment concepts to contemporary buzzwords are processes which are seen as enabling humanity to be like Gods, to speak with authority. Within modernism there are arguments about which process are best and which are broken but there is a fundamental belief that a process is sufficient to guide progress in the right direction – not revelation from beyond. A key intellectual virtue of the Modern world view is therefore rigour – strict adherence to protocols and constraints. Other values which become important are precision and objectivity. There is an unshakable faith that some process will enable the future to be better than the past and the past is generally considered worse than today for not having access to the processes we have.<br /><br />In the Postmodern world view there is a recognition that this way of breaking up history into three phases puts the postmodern in the literary place of the punchline at the end. Postmodern attitudes will therefore need to have all the answers, complete all endings and supercede both the modern and the pre-modern before it. Postmodernity tries to resist this fate for two reasons – one is that the postmodern world view doesn’t believe in itself in the way that the Pre-Modern and Post-Modern attitudes do. In the Modern world view the Premodern ideas are dismissed as myths and stories, unlike its own beliefs. The Post-modern world view doesn’t just consider that the Modern and the Pre-modern ideas both are myths and stories it accepts this as a fair characterization of itself. The whole shebang of the three world views is a myth! Postmodernism itself is an element in a story. You could consider this hyper-critical response to be a continuation of the Modern into the Post-Modern. On the other hand the way in which this criticism destroys the idea of progress – reflected in Postmodernisms refusal to take the throne as our stories ultimate winner – is an element we find in the Pre-Modern.<br /><br />The other reason that Postmodernism tries to resist being the stories final answer is to be found in the way that postmodernists, premodernists and modernists are not fundamentally different. Most of them would rather have a full stomach than an empty one, would rather children laughed than cried and would rather not see the tiger go extinct. All of them want to be right and want to be right in order to see the world be better, pre-modernists through faithfulness and patience and modernists through rigour and objectivity. The problem for Postmodernists is their awareness that the desire to be right and pursue what is best for the world has historically been a justification for terrible cruelty. As modernists believe pre-modern conviction is delusional, and pre-modernists think modernist conviction is hubris, postmodernists agree with them both. Conviction is problematic in the postmodern, particularly conviction of a particular type referred to as belief in a metanarrative.<br /><br />A Metanarrative is the idea that there is one large story for all. For Christians there are many different stories in their church on any given Sunday – Bob is there to thank God for forgiving his adultery, Sarah is there because she finds the company wholesome, Martha is there because she wants to connect with her families heritage, Nick is there to put on the armour of God in his crusade against whatever Nick is fired up about. Each of these stories however are subsumed under one large story of Gods engagement with their creation in which the differences between congregation members are irrelevant. There is not a million different reasons why God sent his son to earth in Christianity, for Bob’s forgiveness and Martha’s traditions and so on, but one reason that defines everyone’s relationship to the story. That’s a metanarrative.<br /><br />The Christian Gospel is only one example of a metanarrative. The idea that being an atheist will improve people’s lives – not just Bob and Sarah’s lives but everybody’s lives and in some basically similar way – is a metanarrative too. Most if not all feminisms are metanarratives. Capitalism and communism both spew out metanarattives. We find less metanarratives in the premodern era – particularly when we see Gods localized to the degree that we have the God of the Israelites with a story only for them. Traditional African religions don’t operate by metanarratives either – each person has their own spiritual quest. The metanarratives zenith was Modernism, which makes sense given the modern valuing of consistency and theory, while Postmodernism tries to avoid metanarratives all together.<br /><br />In this regard Postmodernism is always failing. We are stuck in our three world view story. The moment Postmodernism gains any kind of definition as a philosophy, including the definition that Postmodernists reject metanarratives, then we complete the three world view story and we have a metanarrative containing Postmodernism. All of history becomes expressed in a tale with an implied should to it – you too should avoid metanarratives. I think of this as the contamination of postmodernism by the Modern era. It seems impossible for Postmodernism to break free of Modernism’s production of metanarratives – it seems impossible to speak at all without speaking for everybody.<br /><br />Modernists wants us to reject postmodernism for this failure and inevitable contradictions but why wouldn’t they? This would after all ensure the modern era continues unchallenged and unchallengeable. The Pre-Modern is a foe already on the ropes. Postmodernism has several strategies to resist completely failing (and completely succeeding which paradoxically is the same thing) in separating from Modernism and the chief of these is acceptance. Acceptance is a virtue in the postmodern akin to patience in the Premodern. Postmodernism accepts that it contains contradictions, it accepts that it has to rely on the pre-modern and the modern and can never fully replace them, it accepts that philosophical problems are not solvable. Authority for example is a huge point of conflict between world views. Pre-modernists poke fun at the self-referential nature of moral authority in modernism. Modernists argue that the transcendant in premodernism is simply a God of the gaps and also must be justified by circular logic. Postmodernists accept that living with authority and living without it are both ultimately untenable and therefore any answer to questions of authority has to be tentative and partial, temporary and moderated. The Batman needs Comissioner Gordon who needs the Batman, even though both contradict each other as vigilante and lawman.<br /><br />“Hi, I’m a Postmodernist” is not a particularly great way to introduce oneself at parties. Partly its because postmodern texts can be chock full of made-up words and elusive content. Reading Post-Modern theory can lead us to feel a combination of stupid and angry that someone is trying to make us feel stupid. There are well publicised cases of people using postmodern language to publish gibberish that no-one dared criticize in case it actually meant something brilliant – a sort of intellectual Emperors new clothes. Once exposed these confidence scams drew ire down on the whole enterprise. In it’s wordy posturing postmodern theory can also seem to encourage a superficial involvement with reality; postmodern Nero doesn’t so much fiddle as he engages in “<a href="http://gen-x-lexicon.tumblr.com/post/60438781794/musical-hairsplitting-the-act-of-classifying">musical hair-splitting</a>”, while Rome burns.<br /><br />In it’s defence I don’t think philosophy has been able to talk directly about itself with much clarity for some time. The hyper critical nature of postmodern philosophy in which language and philosophy themselves are being interrogated makes describing this world view directly with language and philosophy terms a fools task. We are better off demonstrating postmodern philosophy in characters set in fiction. Star Trek Voyager is far more postmodern than previous Star Treks for example. The crews preparedness to break their own protocols in order to act responsibly is contradictory. What are they responsible to without those protocols? Elsewhere the Guardians of the Galaxy leave us with the question of whether they will do something bad, something good or a bit of both at the end of their film, never resolving the contradiction of goodies and baddies. Acceptance, partial solutions, imperfect answers are everywhere in our stories. They are not always demonstrated fatalistically and tragically in moral tales that reinforce a need for modernism or the pre-modern. Sometimes we cheer uncertainty and are happy our protagonists are left with the tension of continuing choice.<br /><br />Postmodernism also gets into trouble because of mistaken identities. Sometimes people hear of French Postfeminism and confuse it with American post-feminism. French Postfeminism is a feminist attempt to construct the self post all the assumptions of gender. This is reasonably associated with post modernism in the field of ideas. American post-feminism by contrast is the claim that feminism’s work is done (by gaining women the vote for example) and we can let liberal capitalism progress now without further feminist critique. This is not post-modern but very modern instead. Likewise there seems to me to be nothing particularly postmodern about Francis Fukuyama's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">The End of History and the Last Man</a> with its view that the end of human political evolution has been reached by both liberal democracy and capitalism. American post-feminism and the End of History myth both get lumped under a post-modern banner which the left then forcibly reject. But what they are rejecting are clearly metanarratives that fit perfectly inside Modernism.<br /><br />Another case of mistaken identity is when conservatives reject post-modernism because they see it as promoting moral relativism. In a way they are right but equally they are wrong. Postmodernism rejects one size fits all solutions and this includes moral relativism as an absolute truth in the way that a modernist might use it – to discount all moral speech as nonsense. The arguments that conservatives use to argue against moral relativism – that it will lead us to a position where no evil can be confronted at all – is met with postmodern acceptance. Postmodernists agree but hold this alongside the awareness that outrightly rejecting all moral relativism is just as problematic. Alternatives that postmodernists explore include local truth in which consensus around meaning might be developed differently in differently settings and the idea that language is tactical and collegial rather than strictly truth telling. This is not the same as saying that language is just individual expression. &nbsp;I hope I can explore these concepts further on this blog.<br /><br />This is not an official guide to Postmodernism. I have never heard anyone else use the word acceptance as an intellectual virtue in any context let alone in a breakdown of these world views. You should consider that when writing an academic paper or answering a trivia question. No liability is recognised if you lose a million dollar prize or get a D from quoting me. It’s a profoundly relevant question to this topic to ask how you would establish the authority of this blog post. If your answer is a little bit of this method of verification and a little bit of that method, with a degree of uncertainty never fully dispelled you just might be postmodernist.<br /><br />For a more mainstream discussion of this topic check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we6cwmzhbBE">this lovely fellows lecture</a>.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-45068895508028001922016-04-11T22:10:00.000-07:002016-04-11T23:16:59.439-07:00My classroom, my values, of course. - a discussion of the safe schools program.<div class="MsoNormal">The furor over <a href="http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org.au/">the safe schools program</a> has died down. The Victorian Government is retaining it in my home state with absolutely no changes. The Federal government is proscribing changes that will lower its profile and independence, depoliticize the program and restrict some parts of its information to the discretion of counselors. These are matters of concern for the programs supporters. Likewise conservative Christians in <st1:state w:st="on">Victoria</st1:state> are resenting the complete lack of changes in this state. Oddly the effect of these two polar opposite positions in an area of overlapping jurisdiction is something like a local truce. The chatter and protests over the program are dying down. I doubt very many people will even be switching their votes over these Federal Liberal and State Labor positions that play to each of the parties bases.<br /><br />This abatement of political rhetoric is a welcome relief as much as the settlement leaves nobody happy. The climax of the Australian Christian Lobby’s attack on the program became an attempt to trip up Malcolm Turnbull by the disgruntled conservatives in his party. Their victory may not have even been as substantial as was crowed for the cameras but LGBTI people saw in this that their lives were still legitimate political footballs. For same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults the campaign raised angry memories of powerlessness that many just want to put behind them. This is admittedly selfish given the ongoing nature of the issue for today’s queer high school students. It also reflects that possibly safe schools isn’t the program everyone would choose to fight for.<br /><br />For one thing the safe schools program took a position on gender and sexuality that was hardly Marxist despite that characterization<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-24/bradley-marxism-and-safe-schools/7272764"> being thrown at it.</a>Marxist views on gender and sexuality wouldn’t describe identity as totally self-knowable and primarily about individual expression. Marxist views on sexuality and gender would emphasis how these identities are manufactured by our material circumstances – the means of production we are engaged in, class interests and so on. At best Marxists would say that dominant views of gender and sexuality can be subverted by individuals and communities but that not even our “rebellions” are entirely free or natural. <br /><br />To give some examples of what I mean; Under the safe schools program it feels very much like if almost every boy in class preferred sports to dolls each boy would be able to conclude this is a natural expression of themselves. The advance made by the program would be that boys who felt differently would also see their feelings as a natural expression of themselves. Some queer theorists would prefer to talk about socialization and market forces involved not only in shaping our preferences but in framing our choices as dolls vs sports or as buy vs buy in most cases. Likewise if someone said they preferred blondes to brunettes a typical Marxist position would be to find this an unsurprising product of racism. A Marxist analysis might also note that the importance of hair colour revolves around the importance of a relationship as a status symbol and therefore want to look into how sexuality in late stage capitalism is often about displaying itself and its “success” to others. The safe schools program could silence criticism of a preference for blondes under a banner of “you can be and like anything you want.” Marxists are just much more dour predictors of how society shapes choices than this.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There was very little space in the heat of the safe schools program debate to make these comments or any other criticisms without feeling like a betrayer of gay rights. In my last post I discussed how overwhelming history was in deciding people’s positions in support of safe schools. I’m not the first to argue we humans are too comfortable moving with our intellectual tribes and listening to what leaders tell us to think. However rather than simply decry this as foolish I hope my last post tried to explain some of why this is the case. Tribalism exists and is rationalized when people feel under attack and that barricades need to be maintained. Trust between LGBTI people and conservative Christians has never been spectacularly high and the safe schools “debate” mired in half truths and distortions thrived on that distrust. I still wonder if any criticism I make of the program will simply be seized upon by people who want to make all mention of non-heterosexuality taboo in high school. That isn’t my position, in case I need to say so.<br /><br />This Queer/Christian battle line isn’t the only fault line that the safe schools program sat upon. It was simply the most easy one for the media to portray. The Marxist/individualist clash of paradigms I described was never going to lead the nightly news. One other point of conflict over safe schools did gain a small public hearing however; the safe schools program asked us to consider what if any role public schools have in adopting moral or political positions around sexuality. Bizarrely evangelical Christians argued against the program with the language of liberal philosophy; that education should be largely value neutral by avoiding any mention of what is or isn’t normal/healthy/right or wrong. Meanwhile it was the other side who seemed to tolerate explicit teaching of values in order to normalize same-sex attraction and gender diversity. This reflects a wider trend of conservatives casting themselves as champions of pluralism around sexuality – religious freedom fighters – which remains at odds with their defence of school chaplains and heterosexual only marriage. Likewise LGBTI politics embrace of the state to promote health outcomes is a willingness to wield cultural power that usually only a conservative philosophy can justify. <br /><br />I find this fault line between teaching values and supporting pluralism fascinating as a philosopher and a teacher. The challenge of teaching lies right across it. We are not supposed to use our classrooms as a platform for our moral and political beliefs. I have personally helped students prepare speeches or write essays that argue directly across my own views in line with this. It is ludicrous to suggest that any teacher presents “all the facts” however. I had less than one class to discuss all the politics of genetically modified food with my year nines last year. What would “all the facts” look like on that issue? I chose the story of Golden Rice in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">Philippines</st1:country-region> to humanize the issues for them. There are a hundred alternatives I could have chosen instead but this one struck me as picking up on the most important issues based, frankly, on my values. <br /><br />A teacher who has no values at all simply couldn’t teach. This is why we don’t simply sit kids in front of the internet in classrooms. We very deliberately provide twenty to thirty of them at a time with a person who hopefully cares deeply about the world, about truth and about human suffering. Our discussion about genetically modified food was in the context of looking at food shortages and food security. Do you want someone teaching kids about those issues who doesn’t have an opinion on whether worldwide hunger matters? Do you want &nbsp;someone who doesn’t feel a loss over the replacement of the majestic Amazon with soya plantations and who can’t also empathize with poor locals motivation to clear jungle to farm? <br /><br />Teaching is only superficially valueless. Often I instruct kids to identify stakeholders –a core skill in the humanities. If a student ranks the views of the animal rights activist, or even the chicken themselves, to be unimportant in comparison to the chicken farmer looking to increase sales or the consumer looking for cheap eggs then I have still done my job as a teacher . I have done my job as a teacher if they draw a different conclusion. In this way I can seem to have no values. However on a deeper level by placing the recognition of stakeholders at the core of my teaching, I am promoting what I consider to be a geographers value set – consideration of others, a sensitivity to complexity and the integration of multiple layers of meaning over the same event or location. At the heart of what is good or bad high school geography is not the possession of a set of unchanging facts but a value based relationship to the facts. You could even say that any given set of facts are a product of having a value based approach to the question at hand. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This illustration of the value based heart to teaching in geography describes a scenario in which the victims –Amazonian farmers and damaged chickens&nbsp; - may not be in the room, although indeed some hungry families may well be represented. The expectation that teachers hold values increases when the subjects of discussions are actually sitting in the class. This isn’t an expectation I see particularly coming from parents or even the school system. Instead it is students themselves who expect their teachers have a moral interest in what they are teaching and even more so when it directly relates to who they are teaching. <br /><br />This expectation was readily apparent when we looked at groups in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region> who experienced food insecurity. Students were asked to hypothesize why this might be the case for Aboriginal people, young people and the homeless in particular. In doing so they needed to demonstrate an awareness of what are the elements of food security. At the start of this class I spent considerable time talking through the level of maturity and sensitivity people were expected to bring to this topic. Food insecurity is not foreign to every students life and I relayed that some teachers had cautioned me against opening up this discussion because of the relationship between poverty and stigma and thus the opportunity for abuse. I mentioned briefly my own experiences of unemployment and poverty, low paid jobs and housing insecurity so as to destigmatise these conditions. <br /><br />Some students felt that poverty was connected to laziness and that people without food and on benefits just needed to work harder. They shared these views with me however not to seize some barbed advantage in class but because this seemed plausible to them and they felt I had missed this in my introduction to the task. I didn’t need to correct them The final task was to see whether their hypothesis was reflected in the research. In a way it didn’t matter whether they left class feeling that people were choosing to go hungry due to a character flaw. I would have still taught them about speculation from correlation in the social sciences and introduced them to professional and rigorous explanations of causality. But, and this is a very important but, I don’t think anyone could have accused this class of being valueless or even not having any prejudice. Humility, empathy, generosity, caution and respect were values that informed how the class undertook some basic social science. <br /><br />Would I have challenged a student if they made a statement that was blatantly racist or included racist generalizations? While that is a question which I thankfully didn’t have to face, I probably would have challenged this. I could have done so in many different ways including inviting another student to provide a different perspective. If a racist comment was made in order to grandstand and treat the classroom as an platform to indirectly bully I would have shut the student down forcefully. I don’t put up with that kind of garbage in my class. If the comment was put forward as genuine opinion, especially with some thoughtfulness about how it might offend others, I could have simply encouraged the student to interrogate their conclusion with further questions. My awareness of the broader reality of racism and the presence of affected students would require me to be more pro-active in challenging racist ideas in class than just any idea I disagreed with. <br /><br />Returning to the matter of same-sex attraction and gender diversity I don’t think there is an easy answer to say what values a teacher should bring into the classroom and what they should keep to themselves or how biased&nbsp; a discussion on these matters should be. If a student wanted to grandstand their homophobia in my classroom that is unacceptable but if a student is sensitively critical of same-sex attraction or transgender identity that is not the same thing. The latter student might seem to me to be as misinformed as the first but I would handle it differently because of the core values the latter student is adhering to. I may challenge them gently or not at all even. I don’t see that nuance in the safe schools material.<br /><br />I disagree philosophically with the idea that I can ever teach without values. This doesn’t mean I have to see every student leave class parroting what I think however. In fact the very best questions I have ever asked a class – “Should Bendigonians have a say in what happens to the Barrier reef?” for example– have been questions where barely any two students have agreed but where all students have considered each others point of view. There seem too few of those sorts of open questions in the safe-schools materials.<br /><br />There are also other perspectives –that a bit of bullying is just a lark for example – that I would strictly control any discussion over and where students would know my opinion strongly. And there are other ideas - that anglo-australians are superior to others – that I just laugh down if &nbsp;I heard them. The opinion that same-sex attracted and gender diverse young people should keep their feelings and relationships to themselves is something safe schools materials is and should be biased against. &nbsp;A proud public position of acceptance of same-sex attraction and gender diversity by schools strikes me as a good thing. Not every opinion is equally tolerable. But I do wonder if the safe schools approach is insufficiently grounded in core values of empathy and respect and too worried about the surface value of the opinions students express. That isn’t where I think teaching values should be at. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-3737810334184352152016-03-08T18:19:00.000-08:002016-03-08T19:32:08.409-08:00A Safe Schools discussion must start with the past.I’m going to wade, a little, into the Safe Schools debate that in my last post I dipped my toe into. For those who don’t know the <a href="http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org.au/">Safe Schools Coalition initiative</a>, it can be divided into two things; a series of <a href="http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org.au/all-of-us">lesson plans</a> and <a href="http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org.au/resources">resources</a> for high school teachers to discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex student issues, and recommended high school policies to support those students (found amongst the resources). &nbsp;To shrink the language of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex” I will be referring to this grouping as same-sex attracted and gender-diverse.<br /><br />Although in my younger years some attempt was made to put all the letters of LGBTI under the reclaimed word “Queer” that never took off. For one thing the word Queer became attached to the image of a white wealthy gay male, an inevitability of any singular identity perhaps in a world of ads chasing pink dollars. Many Lesbians insisted on their own particular identity, rather than existing as Queer’s “other”. Queer politics also had agendas that were broader than the LGBTI movement – sex-positivity for example – and whereas Queer tended to embrace Drag, some feminists saw this type of performance as offensive as “black-face”. &nbsp;Still Queer has an edgeyness that LGBTI lacks. Queer is a little more punk and post-normal. For this reason the term still finds favour today.<br /><br />This old debate about the universality of Queer is an obscure element of history. If you lived through it and participated in it, it’s easy to imagine that everyone knows why Queer is not generally considered an acceptable umbrella term and why some people, despite this, still use it. I’m not showing off here. I never learnt this stuff. I was just involved in it. Ask me who won any of the Grand Finals through the 80’s and 90’s and I will have to guess because I wasn’t paying attention to that history. <br /><br />This idea of niche and personal histories is crucial to understanding the debates and discussions around the Safe Schools initiative. Consider the example of the Tasty Raid in Melbourne in 1994. The proportion of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults in Australia who know of this event will be huge. In fact it will be much higher than people who know about why we do or don’t use the term Queer, a largely academic debate. The Tasty raid and the subsequent suing of the Victorian Police was a big deal, but the people who remember it don’t all remember it because they are better historians. Many just remember it because it was about their lives. They either were caught up in it or they learnt about at the time through their networks.<br /><br />A more chilling example of separate history was reported in an article titled ‘Sydney’s Shame’ &nbsp;(http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-shame ). This story reported on systematic gay bashings leading to deliberate murders around Sydney beats, and a culture of police reluctance to investigate. We’re talking here about people found dead at the bottom of cliffs with clear evidence of being assaulted first and the death being ruled as an accident. We’re talking about “fag-bashing” viewed as an ordinary activity to do with your mates. Again this is not necessarily something same-sex attracted and gender diverse people study in specialist classes. It is simply what some have lived through and many more have been aware of as they walk home. Even when these things are reported in mainstream media they become part of the consciousness of some readers and not so much of others.<br /><br />Incidentally this is what women’s experience of the epidemic of violence against women is like. They hold their keys differently. Take out their phone. Stay close to the lights and avoid the alleys. Notice who is walking behind them. Of course therefore they remember more than men the history of this violence, including incidents of violence, poor political or police responses and community reactions. They will appreciate how every single Mardi Gras through the 80’s and 90’s came with a warning to keep yourself safe as you left venues because the gay bashers always stepped up their activities around that time. They will understand how that warning is a part of some peoples history of events. By the way, maybe they still give out that warning, but living in Bendigo with my family I don’t follow Mardi Gras news much anymore; again separate histories.<br /><br />The relevance of all this to how Safe Schools is being discussed, is simple. Virtually every argument in support of the Safe Schools program refers to the history of same-sex attracted or gender diverse people, often incorporating the personal history of the author. The Safe Schools programs are seen as correcting for the systematic oppression that has been the life of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. My last blog did something similar – it drew upon my past. The past is very much present when supporters speak of the Safe Schools program. For them an ugly homophobic past is sitting square in the middle of the discussion.<br /><br />Meanwhile the criticisms of the Safe Schools program are massively ahistorical. They may criticize the program based on its merits, or they may criticize what they have heard is the program based on the merits of that, but they are definitely not evaluating the program in a historical context. How was school for these critics when they were young? Irrelevant. How were workplaces or the media or the law as these critics were emerging into adulthood? They were fine, why would that matter?<br /><br />Occasionally the past is brought into the conversation from some Safe Schools critics, but it is a fantasy past. It is in fact such a fantastic past as to make their criticisms even more ahistorical for mentioning it. In these pasts everyone is neighbourly and chaste, homosexuality is barely mentioned which one supposes means that same-sex attracted people barely existed, and children respect their parents because God is in the schools where He (sic) belongs. You don’t find this sort of fantasy past promoted by serious critics of the program, but it is there amongst the petition signers and the online angry. In this past there are no gay bashings or homophobia at all. This is why I consider it to be even more a denial of history than simply not mentioning history at all. <br /><br />The tendency of the more serious Safe Schools critics is to blunt any historical special interest case by generalizing the focus from homophobic bullying to all bullying. &nbsp;In this way they mirror other ahistorical criticisms of other historical movements. On Q&amp;A recently the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton responded to comments that same-sex attracted and gender-diverse kids are being bullied, with comments that all bullying is wrong for whatever reason. This is a copy of the white response to the hashtag Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter. &nbsp;While technically true there is no knowledge of history in either response. It is as if presented with the Sydney’s Shame article the ACL would say “Well, all police corruption is wrong and nobody is condoning any violence here.”<br /><br />This lack of recognizing their particular history frustrates same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. Weren’t they just sharing their painful pasts moments ago? Were the ACL and their followers listening? This only gets worse when organisations like the ACL claim to be bullied, harassed and silenced today. It was not long ago that being gay was compared to smoking by the then public face and continuing chair of the board of the ACL. The concern the ACL have always shown has been very much like a concern about the uptake of smoking, to thwart any improvement in gay lives lest it encourage more people to take up being gay. Many consider them a source of homophobia.<br /><br />But it’s not even a question of whether the ACL and its current head Lyle Shelton directly spread homophobia or not. The reality is that all the time Shelton was growing up and when he was a newspaper journalist and editor, when he was a city councilor and a state candidate and when he moved to the ACL, same-sex attracted and gender diverse people have been being bullied, bashed and murdered, fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes and turned away from services. Not a single element of this history was ever confronted by Shelton as a journalist, editor, politician or lobbyist. Shelton either never knew about this history or never cared. Most likely it simply passed him by like AFL did me. He didn’t have to decide not to take an interest in it – he simply wasn’t involved in it.<br /><br />Does it seem unfair to you to judge him for this? Does it seem irrelevant to his evaluation of the Safe Schools program? Maybe so in both cases but this is what I suspect is a part of the feeling of the supporters of Safe Schools. For them Safe Schools exists within a history that entitles the voices of same-sex attracted and gender diverse people to speak and disqualifies the speech of people like Lyle Shelton and the ACL. This is a shared feeling, by the way, from supporters of the program who are as heterosexual and cis-gendered as Lyle Shelton. It’s not a Queer thing to privilege Queer voices in this discussion – it’s a historically aware thing. Many even feel it is a human thing – to allow themselves to be silenced by the testimony of the survivors of violence.<br /><br />Having spoken of the frustration of the Safe School supporters, let’s consider the frustration of its critics. In their minds they are making what they feel are rational arguments. Some of their arguments are not rational at all and some of them are wildly misinformed but some of them raise legitimate areas for improvement. If the filter of personal history is driving how Safe Schools supporters feel about the program and its critics, then they can be easily hostile to any criticism being made, almost regardless of the program’s content.<br /><br />The Safe Schools program has been developed with the input of numerous same-sex attracted and gender -diverse young people. It has been implemented successfully at a range of schools including a Catholic school, a tiny country school and many large state schools. This all speaks to how useful and positive a program it is, but it’s still just a program. There are bound to be ways it can improve and mistakes that have been made. It seems to me that by being engaged in historical battles Safe Schools supporters are in danger of viewing all criticisms of the initiative as attacks on LGBTI people. &nbsp;That's not a healthy relationship to any program.<br /><br />If this conversation about Safe Schools is to improve we are going to need people who can confront the history gap in our community. There are some examples of people who speak for conservative Christians who get the importance of history in this discussion and by that I don't mean a token nod to the problem of all bullying. Michael Jensen, &nbsp;is someone I disagree with on Same-Sex marriage but he recently made a long Facebook post which indicated his understanding of LGBTI history. It has since been published by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/michael-jensen/the-playground-can-be-a-brutal-place_b_9395648.html">the Huffinton Post.</a>&nbsp;What is important about this post was that it never tries to subsume homophobic bullying or racist bullying under the generic title of all bullying. Instead it recognized that homophobic bullying occupies a particular place in our history and delivers a particular harm that can only be imperfectly imagined by those who didn't experience it. That's humility.<br /><br />John Sandeman provides another example. He is the editor of Eternity Magazine, a Christian non-denominational publication and one which has defended ACL and taken a conservative stance on LGBTI issues. &nbsp;On the 25th of February this year he wrote an article for the Australian Bible Society website titled, <a href="http://www.biblesociety.org.au/news/the-smh-apologises-to-the-mardi-gras-what-should-christians-do">‘The SMH apologises to the Mardi Gras. What should Christians do?’</a> This was a genuine admission of the history of conservative Christians in denying basic freedoms to same-sex attracted people and in being involved in their systematic oppression.<br /><br />Neither of these pieces of writing specifically mentioned the Safe Schools program although Jensen's piece comes close. Perhaps that enables their authors to be freer with their acceptance of the gains of the LGBTI movement for equality or perhaps even that it is to take their point too far. At least they start the conversation off on the right foot. We should all be able to acknowledge that Australian history is a brutally homophobic one and that this is not just more of the “general” bullying, violence or sinfulness of society. It is a specific problem with same-sex attraction and gender diversity that churches have fostered themselves.<br /><br />From this point I think we should all be able to agree that some kind of program like the Safe Schools initiative is necessary and deserves the paltry eight million dollars that has gone into it. This will be a leap for some conservative Christians but I hope it is one they can make. As <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-01/australian-christian-lobby-is-not-as-influential-as-some-suggest/7210300">Stephanie Judd wrote for the ABC news site,</a> addressing the ACL in particular:<br />“If you feel some Safe Schools content isn't age-appropriate, then isn't dialoguing with them for modifications to the program a better and more gracious approach than pitting yourself against them by calling for their wholesale defunding?”<br />Stephanie, whose byline indicates she attends an Anglican Church, goes on to say that &nbsp;“In the absence of a a satisfactory alternative that addresses the problem that Safe Schools was created to fix, the ACL's statements are going to continue to be received as harsh and unconstructive.”<br /><br />So long as the critics of the Safe Schools initiative come at Safe Schools with axes of outrage rather than ideas for improvement they will seem to have very little idea of lives outside their own. We can see this in their ahistorical approach to the issue. So long as they propose no alternative at all or a generalised alternative that hides the special historical case for justice of same-sex attracted and gender-diverse people, they will seem to have no idea there is even a problem to fix. On that basis they are not going to be listened to and despite what they might tell themselves it won’t be because they are being bullied now. On the other hand, a proper discussion might be had if the examples of John Sandeman and Michael Jensen, both conservatives, have a genuine influence on their peers.<br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-51357802934713248422016-02-21T16:32:00.001-08:002016-02-23T13:31:23.924-08:00They Always Keep the Minority in at Lunch. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-idnl9fTshik/VspMEifGKfI/AAAAAAAABdI/lAe_5KIu7dg/s1600/dunce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-idnl9fTshik/VspMEifGKfI/AAAAAAAABdI/lAe_5KIu7dg/s400/dunce.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Memory is connected to prophecy. We use our memories to tell the future and inform the present. What we remember, and how, is full of salience for the decisions we make and the causes we support. Stuff that we don’t think is relevant to our current situation we forget, and then a memory can come back loudly when it needs to speak its prophetic voice to us.<br /><br />Our prophecies may be wrong. Memories are selective and unreliable. Politics is partly an exercise in competing prophecies. The world that Trump followers fear is different to the world Bernie Sanders followers fear. Those who want to stop the boats are predicting outcomes that are different to those who want to let the babies stay. But these prophecies are powerful to each of us.<br /><br />For some time I have been haunted by a particular memory with a particular message about our time. Is it true? I think it speaks a certain truth.<br /><br />When I was in high school, about year eight or nine, each student was required to give a short speech. One student in my class gave a speech which told us that all gay people should be shot. I kid you not. The speech was allowed to finish and the class, the whole rest of the class it seems to me in my memory, clapped.<br /><br />As a high schooler I was already a leftie. The talk, my teacher’s lack of reaction, the class’s applause for the speaker, all incensed me. &nbsp;Any protest I made was not received. Instead someone made a snide comment about me for dissenting.<br /><br />Well, that meant it was on. For the rest of the class I winked and even blew kisses at the guy who had commented about me. He gradually grew angrier and angrier. He was smaller than me and that was probably why I focused on him. Finally he got up to hit me. I stayed calm but the teacher was no idiot and knew I’d been provoking the situation.<br /><br />After class the teacher made me stay behind. I was in trouble and it was me who would be kept in at lunch. There was some sympathy from the teacher but there was also no doubt that she wouldn’t be taking any kind of recrimination against the student who gave the talk or the one who wanted to hit me. I was the one who needed to be brought into line.<br /><br />The lesson is that rules are not designed, not in school at least, to be right or fair or to protect a loving view of the world from a hateful one. Rules are designed to minimize conflict. My teacher didn’t have to step in when a student said gay people should be shot because any gay people in the class were too in the closet for this to create immediate conflict. And when I made a conflict out of it, the teacher had a choice to try and affect the views of the whole class or to affect my behaviour. They chose the rational if perhaps cowardly choice to change the single student.<br /><br />Today there are <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/a-truly-liberal-society-would-tolerate-the-anglican-churchs-views-on-sexuality/">some religious people</a> who believe that we live in an age of intolerance. We do, but as my memory reminds me it is an age without beginning and only an imaginary end. The intolerance these religious people claim is simply the force that I faced in high school – the desire of institutions to minimize conflict – a force they generally support when it is in their favour. As the world changes, the new minority, in many places, is the student in class who has a problem with homosexuality, who needs to make anti-gay jokes and who wants to make a point of a boy's effeminacy or a girl's machismo. The school fundamentally doesn’t care for who is right. The school will police that minority because they are easier to police than changing the rest of the school.<br /><br />Now this may be unflattering to describe things this way but it shouldn’t be shocking to us. Consider a hypothetical program called “All kinds of families” In this program the notion of blended families, single-parent families, adoptive families, and families with divorced or separated parents are discussed. Does anyone think this program is interested in young Billy’s Roman Catholic views that divorce and remarriage is wrong? Is young Billy’s definition of family, with its problematising of assisted reproduction going to get a hearing? Of course not.<br /><br />And here’s what the teachers are thinking. These teachers want to introduce this program for Sarah who has been sad ever since her parents divorced. These teachers note that every single piece of curriculum material from the picture books to the movies they show has two happily married people with their kids all born in wedlock. These teachers may have grasped this material with a real gratitude for it’s reflection of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, these teachers think “Billy can shut up.”<br /><br />Now when “All kinds of families” was (hypothetically) introduced maybe someone wanted to include same-sex couple’s families. Maybe someone else wanted to include polyamorous partnerships and their families. Most likely if this hypothetical program was produced over a decade ago neither of those families would be included. Again this would not be because of what is right or wrong. This would be because of what stands inside or outside the majority acceptable culture. Excluding same-sex couples and their kids from the program's definition of 'all kinds of family' would minimize conflict up to recent times. Including them now might cause conflict in some places but not so much in others. That is the force that always controls school decisions. Polyamourous families are still out; Way too much conflict there.<br /><br />To see how things have changed for same-sex families though we can look to Play School. The voice of those opposed to including a same-sex couple with kids on a show about diverse family types is firmly in the minority. What did the ABC think of the <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/02/05/gay-play-school-angers-christian-lobby">Australian Christian Lobby’s outrage</a> about the issue? I reckon they thought “The ACL can shut up.”<br /><br />In Victorian schools we now have the “<a href="http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org.au/">Safe Schools</a>” initiative. Some people are shocked that it will normalize homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. In doing so they fear it will de-normalise their own ideas of sexuality in which non-heterosexuality is unnatural or just plain wrong. This, they claim, will simply shift who is ostracized from those who are gay to those opposed to gay rights. I suppose the answer to that is yes, it probably will. Can it do anything else?<br /><br />Some people think it is possible for multiple competing ideas of what is sin and what should be celebrated to survive together in society. If we look at something like divorce and remarriage though I think we see that it isn’t particularly possible at all. Yes, conservative Catholics can choose not to recognize remarriages as legitimate. However nobody wants to hear it – at least not at school or in a workplace or on a publicly funded tv show for kids. Yes, the view is alive and well but is it tolerated? Outside of a personal view of how to live one’s own life it is barely tolerated at all.<br /><br />This is the approach we can expect to take hold around gay marriage in the near future. That you will be required to recognize gay marriages is a reasonable prediction just as politeness requires you now to recognize remarried couples as married. Will you be permitted to add “I don’t agree with homosexuality” at the end of a toast in the staff room when two male co-workers tie the knot? You probably aren’t now. The reason is that conflict minimization is the priority in most workplaces as it is in schools.<br /><br />This normalizing pressure is also the same reason that in many school environments today teachers still don’t mention homosexuality, and texts and films are all 100% heterosexual. In fact often there are no books in a high school library let alone a primary school one which include gay characters. &nbsp;As a teacher I have stopped my students from using “gay” as an insult but in this regard I am atypical. This is not a reflection of what these teachers or schools believe is right or wrong. It is just the priority of minimizing conflict.<br /><br />Conflict is a real concern at the moment because views have been polarised by the pending plebiscite on gay marriage. &nbsp;We would expect the same polarization to be present if a plebiscite on anything else could materially affect that issue. We find this polarization present even in the religious communities which claim to be oppressed by a new intolerance from outside. If your church disapproves of gay marriage you might even be told you are not a Christian if you support it. &nbsp;Meanwhile in a church supportive of gay marriage it will be hard to imagine someone opposed to it being welcomed on plebiscite night. This will probably die down once marriage reform is through.<br /><br />All this might seem terribly depressing. We want to believe that changes in society are the result of enlightenment and reasoning not some force of normalization with a priority of minimizing conflict. Changes in popular opinion might well be the result of good argument. Changes in the hearts and minds of people can also occur through relationships and connections. But policies are not people. Policies change to suit public opinion, after the fact, and in doing so they are always intolerant. They will always keep the minority in at lunch. It’s time we stopped acting like this was something new.<br /><br />I have my beliefs about what are rights and what are privileges and would rather step on privileges to secure every child's rights. As a human who has know the sting of feeling abnormal for same-sex attraction I hunger for a time when that sting is not delivered. As a man who has found my gender roles stupidly limiting and uncomfortable I enjoy seeing young people play with or reject gender entirely. I am generally favorable towards the Safer Schools materials as a result. But I am not going to be surprised if in some classrooms some of the conservative fears of the program come true and kids who disagree with the materials feel constrained in speaking out.<br /><br />I think the best thing we can do is to be transparent about the forces we operate under. I think we can invite debate about school policies while being clear that there is actual learning to be done and every student no matter their sexuality or their views on sexuality has the right to the best environment for that learning to happen. As a teacher I try to stop any lynch mob even if they are rounding up someone who I believe has been a complete dick. But at the end of the day something is probably going to be normalised and something else is not.<br /><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-90207433677397886212016-02-11T20:30:00.001-08:002016-02-11T20:37:51.451-08:00Beware cheap love.Christians are called to love others. One of the clearer teachings of their Saviour is the command to love their enemies. In Christian circles therefore it can be a rebuke in a political discussion that a person is not sufficiently loving the targets of their criticism.<br /><br />Still Christians on the left or right are hardly silenced by this insistence on loving their enemies. The rejoinder against the call to be more loving is that having a critical perspective is in fact being loving. I have heard this defence used to argue that a person loves transgender kids precisely by being loudly critical of their gender identity. They love them so much they want to speak the truth to them although if there are no trans teens around a debate on facebook about them will do.<br /><br />Likewise stop a left wing Christian from bemoaning men’s rights activists for a second and yes they might claim to love them. They may claim to merely hate their policies, similar to hating their sin. They still love the sinner.<br /><br />Let's be honest. There isn’t a lot of material loving likely to be happening between people who strongly disagree. How could there be given that they tend to avoid each other? Seldom does any relationship other than the one of criticism actually exist between a right wing Christian and a transgender teen or between a left wing Christian and an active defender of the patriarchy. Generally speaking the love between these groups is hypothetical at best; I would cross the road to help them if they were injured, and if by some remote chance I was passing by.<br /><br />Often this love is just a romantic notion. Loving is defined as wanting the best for someone else and doesn’t require anymore than the willingness to imagine them happy. The image of their happiness can rely on any number of presumptions about what is best for the other person. It is still loving to steal the children from a person of another faith because you think your faith is the best for them. It is still loving to conceal safer sex information from teens because celibacy is in your opinion best for them. This kind of love can become just another privilege to stand on – a daddy knows best kind of love.<br /><br />What people may mean by this kind of love is that they don’t hate the other person. Some people do genuinely hate the objects of their political criticism. They delight in any misfortune that befalls them. The person who holds to wanting the best for those they are criticizing, claiming to love them by that definition, is different to this. They are not driven by hate. They may however be driven by fear or self-interest or anxiety. There is a lot of space between hate and genuine love.<br /><br />Genuine love requires a relationship. Genuine love involves sacrifice and effort. Genuine love does involve the courage to tell the truth. But if that is all you are doing, telling trans teens or complementarians your opinion of them, maybe not even directly, isn’t it more likely you are just enjoying the soap box and frankly couldn’t give a shit about who you are talking about.<br /><br />I think its commendable and worth noting when hate is not a part of a person’s motivation. This can be demonstrated by reigning in the mockery of peers – maybe suggesting that some criticisms are off-limits and opposing violence most definitely. I think its important to recognize the distinction between a hateful attack and a critique. But I hope we stop calling this not-hate love.<br /><br />I think the commandment to love our enemies has very little to do with abstract feelings maintained at a distance. I think loving someone also can’t come after we have decided our policy on them. Love involves the respect that requires us to rethink our opinions after listening. Love is so specific that our response to one person may not fit the play book, even while our response to another is exactly as foreseen. Love involves speaking critically rarely and listening mostly. We may merely not hate our enemies and not actually love them because it’s hard to do more than this. We shouldn’t cheapen love to the point that it’s easy.<br /><br />Likewise we should stop with the rebuke that provokes the cheap love reaction. We should call out speech that is spiteful, gleefully mean and deceptive. However we should stop expecting people to love the objects of their criticism and holding it against them if they don’t. &nbsp;Sticking up for some population online and in general does not really love them either. It is just a different type of grandstanding and soapboxing. As someone who generally supports trans teens in their transitioning in general maybe love would call me to oppose someone’s transition in the particular.<br /><br />The very same message applies to all sides; Genuine love requires a relationship. Genuine love involves sacrifice and effort. Genuine love does involve the courage to tell the truth. But if that is all you are doing, telling trans teens or complementarians your opinion of them (a positive opinion even), maybe not even directly, isn’t it more likely you are just enjoying the soap box and frankly couldn’t give a shit about who you are talking about.<br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-37211698323045861422015-12-21T18:31:00.002-08:002015-12-22T05:56:02.385-08:00Seasons GrievingsI am not worried about terrorism. This is not because I am somehow more Zen than the rest of the world and never worry about what I cannot change. Nor do I generally apply some objective evidence-based assessment of what I am most at risk of dying from. While terrorism wouldn’t make a short list of significant threats to my person, I fear many things which are statistically improbable; Aneurysms, for example. Why did anyone ever think I needed to learn about aneurysms, the cause of anxiety since before I was an adolescent?<br /><br />Even more than a bubble of air in my brain, I am particularly concerned about another threat, one so overwhelmingly present in my recent experiences as to crowd out any raised alert over acts of terror. For the last six months I have worked in St. Arnaud. I have prepared classes between two teachers who are also farmers. I have driven an hour and twenty minutes each way, each day, past the pastures that produce some of my food. Most poignantly I have driven over dry river beds and besides diminishing dams. All the while I have taught Geography students about food security. I am scared by what I have seen and learnt about.<br /><br />Climate change is real. We have finally come to admit this at a political level at the recent Paris summit. Some people are still in denial. But denying or not people are investing on the basis of the sorts of changes global warming will bring. The U.S. city of Miami is allocating millions to hold back the rising sea while refusing to name what is causing it. Farmers in Australia are not all willing to accept man-made climate change as real but they are changing their crops, or even moving their farms, in the expectation that recent trends in weather patterns will continue.<br /><br />Alongside climate change we are seeing global population growth, desertification of farm lands, competition for cropland from the production of bio-fuels, over fishing and the sort of food waste that can’t be sustained but seems culturally unstoppable. There are answers to these problems in smarter farming, greater sharing and reduced consumption. But our current efforts in these areas will be negated by the best case scenario of a 1.5 degree global temperature rise.<br /><br />My head is playing a powerfully linear narrative. This year is dangerously different to last year. Next year will be crucially not the same as the year before. My children’s lives will not be like mine. The natural world will treat them differently, which is not the same as saying they will have different social mores or use technology differently from my generation. It is a magnitude beyond that. Nature, the benchmark of permanence by which technological and social change can be compared will be different.<br /><br />Christmas is embedded in a circular narrative. Each year a baby is born as much as they were born once in history as well. Songs are sung and a pantomime is enacted in our lives to transport us to that singular moment in time, restored to relevance each year. This is the Christian church calendar that despite declining church attendance still shapes our secular world. The pattern is also the pattern of seasons. Come Easter when the crops would have been harvested across Europe, this child is cut down, their life taken, so that new life can emerge from that death. We are sustained. Our communities are sustained. Our world is sustained by the pattern of acknowledging God’s plan in our world. Prosaically, cynically even, our economy is sustained by the Christmas consumer demand.<br /><br />The constancy of this cycle is a significant part of the message around Christmas every year. We are supposed to return to the original Christmas, to look at the manger frozen in perfect stasis. Even odder nostalgias are celebrated so that Dickensian garbed figurines adorn cards and wrapping paper, . There will be a million sermons which seek not to add a drop to the recipe, but instead suggest that the nativity message of the angel to the shepherds is still the food fit for us on Christmas "morn". Both the tacky and the profound share the message that old is good on this day. Who says morn not morning except at Christmas?<br /><br />Of course the Christian calendar is not something unchanging. Its marking dates are relatively recent in the grand scheme of human history. We stand in its 2015th year. Extending before it is a Jewish calendar now in it’s <a href="https://www.hebcal.com/converter/">5776th year</a>. This calendar corresponds its months to lunar cycles so doesn’t match exactly the civil calendar. Still the event closest to Christmas in date is Chanukah, which commemorates an event only two years before what Christmas remembers. Purim, in March (and the Jewish month of Adar), is perhaps closer in tone to Christmas, with plays and feasting and the exchange of gifts. It recalls an event set in the Ancient Persian Empire. This is Ancient applied too easily though. There are calendars older than this and in my ignorance I wouldn’t even know how to apply linear time to those of <a href="http://www.larrakia.csiro.au/#/calendar/dalay">Aboriginal peoples</a>.<br /><br />Christmas represents, whether adopted voluntarily or imposed by the state, a disruption in the sacramental life that preceded it. Traditionalism in regard to Christmas is therefore a defense of the relatively modern and thus counter-traditionalism. To acknowledge this is to remember that Christian history is ultimately not cyclical but linear. What is happening is not supposed to continue indefinitely. Christian history heads towards the sharp cliff of the end times. Every sale will be a closing sale one day.<br /><br />Normally I resent <a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/sermons-i-would-like-to-hear.html">the intrusion of end times preaching</a> at Christmas. I think it reveals our human discomfort with an image of God that is helpless at birth. In the adoration of the returned and avenging soldier Christ, Jesus gets weaponised in a way infant Jesus can’t sensibly be. But this year while I won’t look for any heavenly intervention to save us I find I am also not satisfied with the practice of Christmas as attention to the past. The same is not sufficient. The manger is burning. We need a new song to sing. Not even the seasons are the same.<br /><div><br /></div><div>This Christmas is not going to be the last but it is the last one we should practice in ignorance of what is happening to this planet. I'm not sure what this means in practical terms. Buy less plastic crap obviously. On a spiritual level ritual is meant to speak to our fears and hopes and I find mine feeling ignored by the observance of Christmas this year. Faithfulness to tradition feels like blitheness towards what is changing. NOT EVEN THE SEASONS ARE THE SAME.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-6703580916544110862015-10-31T17:20:00.003-07:002017-05-09T15:10:26.556-07:00No Sympathy for the (concept of the) Devil<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tzkI6B0WNLg/VjVaRCCQu4I/AAAAAAAABcE/mjVZN4o00a4/s1600/Vertigo-Comic-Lucifer-TV-Show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tzkI6B0WNLg/VjVaRCCQu4I/AAAAAAAABcE/mjVZN4o00a4/s400/Vertigo-Comic-Lucifer-TV-Show.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;"><br />There is <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/07/one-million-moms-promise-devil-of-a-time-for-lucifer-tv-show.html">some hooha at the moment</a> in the <st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place> over a television show, Lucifer, for depicting the Devil in a sympathetic light. But who is the real Devil supposed to be? The word Devil is the Greek version of the Hebrew word Satan. The word Satan simply means adversary – so anyone can be a satan to a cause they oppose. &nbsp;Lucifer is a name attributed to Satan because, meaning light-bringer, it was a nickname for the morning star. As thus it appears in the Book of Isaiah describing a mighty figure cast from the heavens. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">In the third century BCE this reference was taken to refer not only to the Babylonian king it directly meant but also to a unique historical figure. This historical figure was understood to be the same as the serpent in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">garden</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Eve</st1:placename></st1:place> and also the adversary of Revelations who contends with the returned Jesus for the fate of the world. This is the Devil, a single male entity, who has been our adversary since creation.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">Nowadays when we think of Satan or the Devil or Lucifer whether we believe in them or not it is this one immortal being that we tend to think of. They are not omnipotent like God but have some supernatural power. That power can range from the unfathomable, “god of this world”, able to establish Kingdoms and secure victory in battle, (or secure fame and recording contracts) to something much more limited – only able to possess individuals, or even merely a whisperer of dark suggestions. The Lucifer character from the latest t.v. show fits into this archetype.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">But this isn’t the only way that the Devil has been understood. Their role has changed significantly over time, expanding or diminishing depending very much on broader world views. To describe the devil may even be to describe God’s animus to use Jung’s term – the repressed shadow to God’s righteousness.&nbsp; It has long been my view that asking what God would be like, as the perfect object of worship, has usefulness to non-believers as much as theists, as a thought exercise. I don’t argue against the existence of God so much as I want to know what kind of God a person cares to follow. I am far less inclined to extend this merit to the concept of the Devil though.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8YMa93Cm1s8/VjVZskej5PI/AAAAAAAABb8/6LTNRcgdmj8/s1600/Francisco_de_Goya_y_Lucientes_-_Witches%2527_Sabbath_-_WGA10007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8YMa93Cm1s8/VjVZskej5PI/AAAAAAAABb8/6LTNRcgdmj8/s320/Francisco_de_Goya_y_Lucientes_-_Witches%2527_Sabbath_-_WGA10007.jpg" width="231" /></a>The Devil has always served as a crude political tool. The Devil gained horns and goat legs when Christianity wanted to demonise Pan worship in its first few centuries. During the Crusades both Muslims and Christians justified atrocities on the basis that their opponents served Satan. The Crusade against the Cathars, a Christian Gnostic sect, declared them Satanists too. The Reformation called the Pope, the Anti-Christ, in league with the devil and the Catholic church made the same claim about protestants. Whatever theological purpose the Devil serves seems secondary to immediate politics.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">On the more local level the Devil has served humanity no better. &nbsp;Both the medieval and puritan slaughter of women for witchcraft, often to obtain land from widows, found the Devil everywhere. The idea that women are especially subject to the devils seductions lingers in their oppression in churches today. Also in an <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/extreme.and.violent.exorcism.practices.lead.to.record.number.of.ritual.child.abuse.cases/41442.htm">alarmingly increasing trend </a>the devil as an explanation can be seen in cases of child abuse and neglect. Brutal and at times deadly practices are being justified as the exorcism practices of the perpetrators. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">I had intended this blog post to be a humorous tour of the different ideas of the Christian devil. I thought to visit not only perceptions in the Old Testament, particularly the Book of Job, and the New Testament but also ideas in popular culture. There are some ideas of the devil, as the ruler of Hell, which I find subtly funny; as if they were a middle manager assigned to the torture department of a large bureaucracy, burdened by expectations from head office. But to be honest I don’t have the heart for it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">More seriously I had wanted to challenge myself as well to find the ways in which a concept of the devil might be useful. I’ve only been able to think of two. Firstly working in addictions for many years I know it can be beneficial for some people to externalize compulsions – to disown them by attributing them to a medical condition. Maybe the devil’s influence can do this for a range of unwanted behaviours, even social problems like war and the destruction of environments.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">Secondly the devil serves as a spiritual source of evil. Without this kind of a transcendent cause we might be more inclined to source evil in our animal instincts instead. Does this do justice to either evil or animals? I don’t think so; the holocaust is a uniquely human sort of endeavour. So maybe the devil has a usefulness in this regard, in recognizing evil as something that divides us from the rest of nature rather than is drawn from it.<br /><br />In the end though I couldn’t see how a further investigation of the devil would reach my goal to find humour or practical benefit without glossing over far too much harm. God’s name can be found on the lips of those who speak up for refugees, against racism, and for the homeless. God is also declared by those who seek their own power over others. The Devil on the other hand, with very rare exceptions (which I might explore further another time) is declared present and powerful with the result of horrible suffering. The idea just doesn’t seem redeemable enough so I’m cutting the exercise short. Maybe the show Lucifer will be different precisely because its devil is less than pure evil and more like the rest of us.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;"><br /><br />________________________________________________________________________<br /><br />Still interested despite my thoughts? The following clips are worth a watch;<br /><!--[endif]--></div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKWZEcdLkZ8">History of the Belief in the Devil</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFELjBOhYvk">History of the Devil</a><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0